Setting up AWS Firewall Manager​ AWS Shield Advanced policies

You can use AWS Firewall Manager to enable AWS Shield Advanced protections across your organization.

Important

Firewall Manager doesn't support Amazon Route 53 or AWS Global Accelerator. If you need to protect these resources with Shield Advanced, you can't use a Firewall Manager policy. Instead, follow the instructions in Adding AWS Shield Advanced protection to AWS resources.

To use Firewall Manager to enable Shield Advanced protection, perform the following steps in sequence.

Step 1: Completing the prerequisites

There are several mandatory steps to prepare your account for AWS Firewall Manager. Those steps are described in AWS Firewall Manager prerequisites. Complete all the prerequisites before proceeding to Step 2: Creating and applying a Shield Advanced policy.

Step 2: Creating and applying a Shield Advanced policy

After completing the prerequisites, you create an AWS Firewall Manager Shield Advanced policy. A Firewall Manager Shield Advanced policy contains the accounts and resources that you want to protect with Shield Advanced.

Important

Firewall Manager does not support Amazon Route 53 or AWS Global Accelerator. If you need to protect these resources with Shield Advanced, you can't use a Firewall Manager policy. Instead, follow the instructions in Adding AWS Shield Advanced protection to AWS resources.

To create a Firewall Manager Shield Advanced policy (console)

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console using your Firewall Manager administrator account, and then open the Firewall Manager console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/wafv2/fmsv2. For information about setting up a Firewall Manager administrator account, see AWS Firewall Manager prerequisites.

   Note

   For information about setting up a Firewall Manager administrator account, see AWS Firewall Manager prerequisites.

2. In the navigation pane, choose Security policies.

3. Choose Create policy.

4. For Policy type, choose Shield Advanced.

   To create a Shield Advanced policy, your Firewall Manager administrator account must be subscribed to Shield Advanced. If you are not subscribed, you are prompted to do so. For information about the cost for subscribing, see AWS Shield Advanced Pricing.

   Note

   You don't need to manually subscribe each member account to Shield Advanced. Firewall Manager does this for you when it creates the policy. Each account must remain subscribed for Firewall Manager and Shield Advanced to continue to protect resources in the account.

5. For Region, choose an AWS Region. To protect Amazon CloudFront resources, choose Global.

   To protect resources in multiple Regions (other than CloudFront resources), you must create separate Firewall Manager policies for each Region.

6. Choose Next.

7. For Name, enter a descriptive name.

8. (Global Region only) For Global Region policies, you can choose whether you want to manage Shield Advanced automatic application layer DDoS mitigation. For this tutorial, leave this choice at the default setting of Ignore.

9. For Policy action, choose the option that doesn't automatically remediate.

10. Choose Next.

11. AWS accounts this policy applies to allows you to narrow the scope of your policy by specifying accounts to include or exclude. For this tutorial, choose Include all accounts under my organization.

12. Choose the types of resources that you want to protect.

    Firewall Manager doesn't support Amazon Route 53 or AWS Global Accelerator. If you need to protect these resources with Shield Advanced, you can't use a Firewall Manager policy. Instead, follow the Shield Advanced guidance at Adding AWS Shield Advanced protection to AWS resources.

13. For Resources, you can narrow the scope of the policy using tagging, by either including or excluding resources with the tags that you specify. You can use inclusion or exclusion, and not both. For more information about tags, see Working with Tag Editor.

    If you enter more than one tag, a resource must have all of the tags to be included or excluded.

    Resource tags can only have non-null values. If you omit the value for a tag, Firewall Manager saves the tag with an empty string value: "". Resource tags only match with tags that have the same key and the same value.

14. Choose Next.

15. For Policy tags, add any identifying tags that you want to add to the Firewall Manager policy resource. For more information about tags, see Working with Tag Editor.

16. Choose Next.

17. Review the new policy settings and return to any pages where you need to any adjustments.

    Check to be sure that Policy actions is set to Identify resources that don’t comply with the policy rules, but don’t auto remediate. This allows you to review the changes that your policy would make before you enable them.

18. When you are satisfied with the policy, choose Create policy.

    In the AWS Firewall Manager policies pane, your policy should be listed. It will probably indicate Pending under the accounts headings and it will indicate the status of the Automatic remediation setting. The creation of a policy can take several minutes. After the Pending status is replaced with account counts, you can choose the policy name to explore the compliance status of the accounts and resources. For information, see Viewing compliance information for an AWS Firewall Manager policy

Continue to Step 3: (Optional) Authorizing the Shield Response Team (SRT).

Step 3: (Optional) Authorizing the Shield Response Team (SRT)

One of the benefits of AWS Shield Advanced is support from the Shield Response Team (SRT). When you experience a potential DDoS attack, you can contact the AWS Support Center. If necessary, the Support Center escalates your issue to the SRT. The SRT helps you analyze the suspicious activity and assists you in mitigating the issue. This mitigation often involves creating or updating AWS WAF rules and web ACLs in your account. The SRT can inspect your AWS WAF configuration and create or update AWS WAF rules and web ACLs for you, but the team needs your authorization to do so. We recommend that as part of setting up AWS Shield Advanced, you proactively provide the SRT with the needed authorization. Providing authorization ahead of time helps prevent mitigation delays in the event of an actual attack.

You authorize and contact the SRT at the account level. That is, the account owner, not the Firewall Manager administrator, must perform the following steps to authorize the SRT to mitigate potential attacks. The Firewall Manager administrator can authorize the SRT only for accounts that they own. Likewise, only the account owner can contact the SRT for support.

Note

To use the services of the SRT, you must be subscribed to the Business Support plan or the Enterprise Support plan.

To authorize the SRT to mitigate potential attacks on your behalf, follow the instructions in Managed DDoS event response with Shield Response Team (SRT) support. You can change SRT access and permissions at any time by using the same steps.

Continue to Step 4: Configuring Amazon SNS notifications and Amazon CloudWatch alarms.

Step 4: Configuring Amazon SNS notifications and Amazon CloudWatch alarms

You can continue from this step without configuring Amazon SNS notifications or CloudWatch alarms. However, configuring these alarms and notifications significantly increases your visibility into possible DDoS events.

You can monitor your protected resources for potential DDoS activity using Amazon SNS. To receive notification of possible attacks, create an Amazon SNS topic for each Region.

Important

Amazon SNS notifications of potential DDoS activity are not sent in real time and can be delayed. To enable real-time notifications of potential DDoS activity, you can use a CloudWatch alarm. Your alarm must be based on the DDoSDetected metric from the account in which the protected resource exists.

To create an Amazon SNS topic in Firewall Manager (console)

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console using your Firewall Manager administrator account, and then open the Firewall Manager console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/wafv2/fmsv2. For information about setting up a Firewall Manager administrator account, see AWS Firewall Manager prerequisites.

   Note

   For information about setting up a Firewall Manager administrator account, see AWS Firewall Manager prerequisites.

2. In the navigation pane, under AWS FMS, choose Settings.

3. Choose Create new topic.

4. Enter a topic name.

5. Enter an email address that the Amazon SNS messages will be sent to, and then choose Add email address.

6. Choose Update SNS configuration.

Configuring Amazon CloudWatch alarms

Shield Advanced records detection, mitigation, and top contributor metrics in CloudWatch that you can monitor. For more information, see AWS Shield Advanced metrics. CloudWatch incurs additional costs. For CloudWatch pricing, see Amazon CloudWatch Pricing.

To create a CloudWatch alarm, follow the instructions in Using Amazon CloudWatch Alarms. By default, Shield Advanced configures CloudWatch to alert you after just one indicator of a potential DDoS event. If needed, you can use the CloudWatch console to change this setting to alert you only after multiple indicators are detected.

Note

In addition to the alarms, you can also use a CloudWatch dashboard to monitor potential DDoS activity. The dashboard collects and processes raw data from Shield Advanced into readable, near real-time metrics. You can use statistics in Amazon CloudWatch to gain a perspective on how your web application or service is performing. For more information, see What is CloudWatch in the Amazon CloudWatch User Guide.

For instructions about creating a CloudWatch dashboard, see Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch. For information about specific Shield Advanced metrics that you can add to your dashboard, see AWS Shield Advanced metrics.

When you've completed your Shield Advanced configuration, familiarize yourself with your options for viewing events at Visibility into DDoS events with Shield Advanced.