Top 5 AWS Network and Application Protection Services

Internet-facing networks and applications are highly susceptible to external attacks. Your AWS applications and networks face threats such as cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS), and brute-force attacks, that can lead to unauthorized access, performance degradation, and data theft. In order to protect against web-based attacks, AWS offers Network and Application Protection services.

In this blog post, we talk about the AWS services that are designed to give your organization complete visibility and fine-grained control over your applications and networks to ensure consistent protection across your AWS account. In addition to stopping web exploits and advanced DDoS mitigation, they give you visibility and the ability to centrally manage the security of all your networks and applications.

1. AWS Shield

AWS Shield is a security service that safeguards your application against DDoS attacks. This fully managed service provides always-on detection and mitigation that minimize application downtime and latency. AWS Shield has two tiers, namely, Standard and Advanced. AWS Shield Standard comes at no additional cost and is enabled by default. It provides comprehensive protection against all known infrastructure network and transport layer attacks.

For a higher level of protection, you can subscribe to AWS Shield Advanced. It protects your applications running on Amazon EC2, Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront, AWS Global Accelerator, and Amazon Route 53 resources. In addition to protection against Layer 3 and 4 attacks, AWS Shield Advanced provides additional detection and mitigation against large and sophisticated DDoS attacks, near real-time visibility into attacks, and integration with AWS WAF.

2. AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF)

AWS WAF is a web-based application that protects your applications and APIs against common web exploits that hinder the availability and unauthorized consumption of resources. It allows you to create security rules, enabling you to control traffic and block common attacks such as cross-site scripting and SQL injection.

AWS WAF monitors and protects applications and APIs built on CloudFront, API Gateway, and AppSync. It allows you to create rules based on different criteria such as the source IP address, the request’s origin country, values in headers and bodies, etc. You can also take advantage of the pre-configured set of rules managed by AWS, which makes implementation quick and easy. These rules are regularly updated to account for new issues.

AWS WAF also allows you to customize rules that filter out specific traffic patterns. And it includes a full-featured API, which lets you automate the creation, deployment, and maintenance of security rules. Additionally, you can also use 3rd party managed rules from leading security vendors that are also available on the AWS Marketplace.

3. AWS Network Firewall

AWS Network Firewall is a managed service that allows you to easily deploy essential network protection for your AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). It can be set up and deployed with a few clicks and automatically scales with your network traffic. Using AWS Network Firewall, you can define rules that give you fine-grained control over your network traffic. 

Additionally, it also includes features that protect your network from common network threats. Its intrusion prevention system (IPS) helps you to identify and block vulnerability exploits, while web filtering can block traffic from known malicious URLs. AWS Network Firewall is easy to implement. You can access it from Amazon VPC Console, where you can create or import firewall rules, group them into policies, and apply them to your VPCs.

4. Amazon Inspector

Amazon Inspector is an automated and continual security assessment service. It helps you with vulnerability management by continually scanning AWS workloads for software vulnerabilities and unintended network exposure. Amazon Inspector security assessments include:

• Network access, 

• Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), 

• Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks, and 

• Common Best Practices

Amazon Inspector provides a detailed report that lists security findings prioritized by severity. This helps streamline your workflow and reduces the time necessary to remediate vulnerabilities.

5. AWS Secrets Manager

AWS Secrets Manager helps you protect the secrets necessary for accessing your applications, services, and IT resources. It allows you to easily manage, rotate, and retrieve database credentials, API keys, and other secrets throughout their lifecycle.

AWS Secrets Manager eliminates the need to hardcode sensitive information by allowing users and applications to retrieve secrets with a call to Secrets Manager APIs. The service can also be extended to include other types of credentials such as API keys and OAuth tokens.

In addition, it gives you granular control over permissions, allowing you to specify what actions, such as creating, updating, deleting, or retrieving, an entity can perform. It also offers secret rotation with built-in integration for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DocumentDB.

Conclusion

Your AWS network and applications are vulnerable to common web exploits such as malicious DNS queries, XSS, DDoS, etc. Such cyber-attacks can lead to performance degradation and data theft that can negatively impact the sustainability of your business.

Thankfully, AWS Network and Application Protection services minimize such risk by addressing your protection needs as well as compliance requirements. Nevertheless, it is your responsibility to correctly implement relevant security tools and monitor your business operations and cloud environments to identify new vulnerabilities and business requirements as and when they arise.

Are your cloud deployments secure? Have you implemented requisite security controls and met compliance requirements? Effectively managing your cloud security requirements in a dynamic business environment can be a real challenge. Reach out to us by clicking the button below to learn how we can help you adequately secure your AWS network and applications.