Detecting Malicious Web Requests With AWS Web Application Firewall

AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a service that helps you protect your cloud resources from malicious web requests. AWS WAF allows you to apply security rules to block bot traffic and common web request attacks.

Learning how to use AWS WAF to protect against common exploits will help you achieve higher availability, avoid security breaches, and manage costs by preventing excessive resource consumption.

In this hands-on lab, you will use AWS WAF to create some rules to block and count certain kinds of requests. And you will test that the rules are working.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this beginner level lab, you will be able to:

• Create a Web Access Control List (ACL)
• Associate a Web ACL with an Application Load Balancer
• Create Managed and custom Web ACL rules
• Test that the rules you created are working

Intended Audience

• Candidates for the AWS Certified Advanced Networking Specialty certification
• Cloud Architects
• DevOps Engineers

Prerequisites

Familiarity with the following will be beneficial but is not required:

• ELB Application Load Balancers
• The Bash shell

The following lab and course can be used to fulfill the prerequisites:

• Application Load Balancer
• Linux Command Line Byte Session

Updates

January 29th, 2024 - Updated screenshots & instructions to reflect latest UI 

May 10th, 2023 - Updated screenshots & instructions to reflect latest UI

October 22nd, 2021 - Added information about request size constraints