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Case Study

Advanced DDoS Protection for High-Traffic Analytics Platforms

Challenges

  • DDoS Threats & Attack Types Addressed The WAF was configured to mitigate Layer 7 HTTP floods, API abuse, volumetric traffic spikes, credential stuffing, and malicious bot traffic. These threats were identified from historical attack patterns and AWS Shield reports.

Solution Provided by Factual Minds

Protected Workloads & Scope

AWS WAF was deployed in front of Amazon CloudFront distributions for the BI dashboards, Application Load Balancers for backend microservices, and Amazon API Gateway endpoints serving mobile and partner integrations.

Integration with AWS Shield & Other Services

AWS WAF rules work in conjunction with AWS Shield Advanced for volumetric attack absorption and AWS Firewall Manager for centralized rule enforcement. Amazon CloudWatch alarms and AWS Lambda functions automate threat response actions.

Automation & Continuous Improvement

WAF configurations are managed through AWS CloudFormation stacks with automated CI/CD deployments. IP sets are updated dynamically from AWS Threat Intelligence feeds and third-party APIs. Monthly reviews of WAF logs in Amazon Athena inform rule tuning and optimization.

Implementation Details

  • Managed Rule Groups: AWS Managed Core Rule Set, AWS Managed Bot Control, Anonymous IP List
  • Custom Rules: Rate-based blocking for abusive IPs, regex patterns for malicious payloads
  • WebACL Capacity Units (WCU): 2,000- Priority Settings: Shield-related rules, managed rules, then custom rules
  • Logging: Full request logging to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, stored in S3 for analytics

Results & Impact

Before deployment: Average of 2 major DDoS incidents per quarter, causing up to 4 hours of downtime.

After deployment: 100% of identified malicious traffic blocked before impacting workloads, no downtime in the past 12 months, BI query performance improved by 15% due to reduced load.

Get Started Today

Don’t wait for the next attack. At Factual Minds, we design AWS WAF + Shield Advanced deployments that block DDoS threats before they impact uptime.

Let’s secure your workloads.

 

Executive Summary

TargetBay implemented AWS WAF as part of a comprehensive DDoS mitigation strategy to protect its high-traffic business intelligence and analytics platform. The deployment was designed to address both volumetric and application-layer attacks, while integrating seamlessly with AWS Shield Advanced for multi-layered protection.

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