- [Harith] Hello. Welcome
to "Getting Started With AWS WAF" series.
My name is Harith.
I'm a senior solutions architect here
at Amazon Web Services.
This is a quick service overview, where I aim to provide
a functional understanding of AWS WAF service.
To begin with, web applications
and APIs face security risks that can cost downtime
or consume excessive resources
from attacks that target the availability
of your application like denial-of-service attacks
that are more common to your applications
like application-based exploits
and bots that aim to manipulate,
defraud and disrupt your APIs.
AWS WAF is a web application firewall that protects
against these kinds of common web exploits
and bots that may affect availability,
compromise security or consume excessive resources.
You can deploy it with few clicks
to protect your applications,
whether they're run in the cloud or on premises.
There is no need for reverse proxy,
DMS setup, importing TLS certificates
or any other operational overhead.
You can directly enable it at the Edge through CloudFront,
which is our content delivery network.
You can put it directly on top
of your application load balancer at a regional level.
If your architecture is serverless,
or if you're using a microservice,
you can use AWS WAF with API Gateway.
You can also enable AWS WAF integration
for your GraphQL APIs in AWS AppSync.
AWS WAF also integrates with Amazon Cognito,
making it even easier to protect Cognito user pools
and hosted UI from common web exploits.
AWS WAF gives you control over which traffic
to allow or block to your web applications
by defining customizable web security rules.
Quickly get started using managed rules
for AWS WAF, which include preconfigured rules
for protection against common exploits.
You can customize an existing rule
or create your own rules
to filter out specific traffic patterns based
on HTTP headers, geo-locations, IP repetitions
or frequency of the request.
AWS WAF also supports third-party-managed rules.
Additionally, AWS WAF supports custom header insertions,
custom response codes and labeling features.
With labeling, you can enable interval communication
within the same web ACL.
You can also use AWS WAF's
intelligent threat mitigation features like Bot Control
and Account Takeover Protection.
Bot Control checks various header fields
and request properties against known bot signatures
to detect and categorize automated bots,
such as creepers, scanners and crawlers.
Account Takeover Protection gives you visibility
and control over login attempts
from bad actors using compromised credentials.
This helps you prevent fraudulent activity.
You can also configure your AWS WAF rules
to run CAPTCHA check against web requests
to tell bots and humans apart.
We support both audio and visual puzzles for CAPTCHA.
AWS WAF offers near-real time traffic visibility,
and you can monitor your AWS WAF with Amazon CloudWatch,
AWS CloudTrail and AWS Config services.
AWS WAF supports full logging,
where you can log each inspected web request data
for security automation, analytics or auditing purposes.
Logs can be directly sent to a CloudWatch log group
or piped through a Amazon Kinesis data firehose,
which allows you to specify all these options for storage.
You can also build dashboards and analytics
on top of these logs by integrating with AWS services,
like Amazon Athena or Amazon CloudWatch Insights,
or pipe your logs over an Amazon Kinesis data firehose
and use Kibana over S3 or Amazon OpenSearch
for analysis and visualization.
AWS WAF fully integrates with AWS Firewall Manager.
You can scale your web ACL policies across multiple accounts
from a central account using AWS Firewall Manager service.
Thank you.
Hope the service overview provided was helpful.
We plan to publish more modules to this series,
and our documentation posted in the description
has more details on this topic,
and I recommend it for further reading.
Thank you for your time and happy cloud computing
from all of us here at AWS.