AWS WAF Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) prevention

AWS WAF offers sophisticated and customizable protection against DDoS attacks in your AWS resources. Review the options described in this section and select the level of Anti-DDoS protection that meets your security and business needs.

You can choose from two tiers of DDoS protection in AWS WAF:

Resource-level DDoS protection

The standard tier works within Application Load Balancers to defend against known malicious sources through on-host filtering. You can configure the protective behavior to best react to potential DDoS events.

Resource-level DDoS protection:

• Monitors your traffic patterns automatically.

• Updates threat intelligence in real time.

• Protects against known malicious sources.

To optimize web ACL request costs for your Application Load Balancer

You must associate a web ACL with your Application Load Balancer to enable resource-level protection. If your Application Load Balancer is associated with a web ACL that has no configuration, you will not incur charges from AWS WAF requests, however, AWS WAF will not provide sampled requests or report on the Application Load Balancer in CloudWatch metrics. You can take the following actions to enable observability features for the Application Load Balancer:

• Use the Block action or Allow action with custom request headers in the DefaultAction. For information, see Inserting custom request headers for non-blocking actions.

• Add any rules to the web ACL. For information, see AWS WAF rules.

• Enable a logging destination. For information, see Configuring logging for a protection pack (web ACL).

• Associate the web ACL with an AWS Firewall Manager policy. For information, see Creating an AWS Firewall Manager policy for AWS WAF.

AWS WAF will not provide sampled requests or publish CloudWatch metrics without these configurations.

AWS managed rule group DDoS protection

The advanced tier of DDoS protections is offered through the AWSManagedRulesAntiDDoSRuleSet. The managed rule group complements the resource-level tier of protection, with the following notable differences:

• Protection extends to both Application Load Balancers and CloudFront distributions

• Traffic baselines are created for your protected resources to improve detection of novel attack patterns.

• Protective behavior is activated according to sensitivity levels you select.

• Manages and labels requests to protected resources during probable DDoS events.

For a comprehensive list of the rules and functionality included, see AWS WAF Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) prevention rule group.

Note

You are charged additional fees when you use this managed rule group. For more information, see AWS WAF Pricing.

Topics

• Resource-level DDoS protection for Application Load Balancers

• Advanced Anti-DDoS protection using the AWS WAF Anti-DDoS managed rule group