AWS WAF Case Study: PCI Compliance & Threat Protection for eCommerce

Challenge

Henne Organics, a premium organic beauty brand, needed to protect its eCommerce storefront while maintaining strict PCI DSS compliance for handling cardholder data. The platform was under constant threat from SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), HTTP flood attacks, credential stuffing, and malicious bots targeting checkout and account pages.

The security landscape was compounding compliance risk, with an average of four compliance-related security incidents per quarter. Each incident required manual investigation, remediation, and documentation, consuming engineering resources and threatening the brand’s ability to pass PCI audits.

Solution

FactualMinds deployed AWS WAF in a compliance-driven configuration tailored specifically for eCommerce workloads, mapping WAF controls directly to PCI DSS requirements.

AWS WAF Deployment Points:

• CloudFront distribution for the main storefront
• Application Load Balancers for backend order processing APIs
• API Gateway for mobile app endpoints

Rule Configuration:

• Managed Rule Groups: Core Rule Set, Bot Control, and dedicated SQLi/XSS Rules
• Custom Rules: Scope-down statements targeting checkout paths and geolocation restrictions for high-risk regions
• WebACL Capacity: 1,600 units

PCI DSS Alignment:

• Requirement 6.6: WAF deployed as the web application firewall control
• Requirement 10.6: Comprehensive logging with scheduled reviews via Amazon Athena
• Requirement 11.4: Intrusion detection capabilities through WAF rule monitoring and alerting

Implementation Details

WAF configurations were fully automated through CloudFormation templates integrated into a CI/CD pipeline, ensuring that security policies were version-controlled and auditable, a key requirement for PCI compliance documentation.

All WAF logs were stored in Amazon S3 with query-based analysis through Amazon Athena, enabling both real-time incident response and the periodic log reviews mandated by PCI DSS Requirement 10.6.

Weekly Amazon Inspector vulnerability scans were configured to automatically trigger WAF rule updates when new vulnerabilities were detected in the application stack. Threat intelligence from both AWS-native and third-party feeds was incorporated to stay ahead of emerging attack patterns.

The deployment prioritized zero impact on legitimate checkout traffic, using scope-down statements to apply stricter rules only to sensitive paths like payment processing and account management pages.

Results

The compliance-driven WAF deployment delivered strong outcomes across security and business metrics:

• 100% compliance audit pass rate across all subsequent PCI DSS assessments
• 97.5% of malicious requests blocked before reaching the application layer
• 8% reduction in checkout abandonment as page performance and reliability improved with reduced malicious traffic load

Henne Organics now maintains continuous PCI compliance with automated evidence collection, while the eCommerce platform operates with significantly reduced exposure to web-based threats.