AWS WAF Case Study: DDoS Mitigation for Business Intelligence Platforms

Challenge

TargetBay operates a high-traffic business intelligence and analytics platform that had become a frequent target for sophisticated DDoS attacks. The platform faced a range of threats including Layer 7 HTTP floods, API abuse, volumetric traffic spikes, credential stuffing, and malicious bot traffic.

Prior to engaging FactualMinds, TargetBay experienced an average of two major DDoS incidents per quarter, each causing up to four hours of downtime. These disruptions directly impacted customers relying on real-time analytics dashboards and reporting, resulting in lost revenue and eroded trust.

Solution

FactualMinds deployed AWS WAF as the cornerstone of a multi-layered DDoS mitigation strategy, integrated with AWS Shield Advanced for comprehensive protection across all attack vectors.

AWS WAF Deployment Points:

• CloudFront distributions serving BI dashboards
• Application Load Balancers for backend microservices
• API Gateway endpoints for external integrations

Rule Configuration:

• Managed Rule Groups: AWS Managed Core Rule Set, Bot Control, and Anonymous IP List
• Custom Rules: Rate-based blocking for abusive IPs and regex patterns to detect malicious payloads
• WebACL Capacity: 2,000 units allocated for comprehensive rule coverage

Integration and Automation:

• AWS Shield Advanced for volumetric attack absorption at the network layer
• AWS Firewall Manager for centralized rule enforcement across all accounts
• CloudWatch alarms paired with Lambda functions for automated threat response
• IP sets updated dynamically from AWS Threat Intelligence feeds

Implementation Details

The entire WAF configuration was managed through AWS CloudFormation templates integrated into a CI/CD pipeline, ensuring consistent deployments and version-controlled security policies.

Full request logging was routed through Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose and stored in Amazon S3, providing a durable audit trail for compliance and forensic analysis. Monthly reviews of WAF logs were conducted using Amazon Athena to identify emerging threat patterns and fine-tune rule thresholds.

The phased rollout began with count mode to baseline traffic patterns, followed by gradual enforcement to minimize false positives before switching to full block mode.

Results

The deployment delivered immediate and measurable impact:

• 100% of malicious traffic blocked across all protected endpoints
• Zero downtime in the 12 months following deployment, down from an average of 8 hours per quarter
• 15% improvement in BI query performance as backend resources were freed from processing malicious requests

TargetBay now operates with confidence that its analytics platform is protected against both known and emerging DDoS threats, with automated response capabilities that scale with the attack surface.