AWS Network Protection
AWS Tutorial: AWS Network Protection
Welcome to the Network Protection lesson. While IAM protects your accounts, you must also protect your public-facing applications from malicious internet traffic, hackers, and DDoS attacks.
Why Learn Network Protection?
If your website is successful, it will be targeted by malicious bots trying to exploit vulnerabilities or overload your servers. Understanding the automated defense mechanisms AWS provides allows you to sleep peacefully at night.
Tutorial Overview
In this tutorial, you will learn the two primary perimeter security services:
- AWS Shield (DDoS Protection)
- AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall)
Perimeter Security Services
- AWS Shield: A managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service. It safeguards your applications from attacks that attempt to overwhelm your servers with fake traffic. Shield Standard is automatically active on every single AWS account for free! For massive enterprise protection, you can upgrade to Shield Advanced.
- AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall): Protects your web applications from common web exploits (like SQL injection and Cross-Site Scripting) that could compromise security or consume excessive resources. You create specific rules (e.g., "Block all traffic originating from a specific bad IP address").
Together, these services sit at the edge of the AWS network, destroying malicious traffic before it ever even reaches your VPC or EC2 instances!
Exercise
?Which managed AWS service is automatically activated on all accounts to protect against standard DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks?