Case Study
Protected Workloads & Scope:
WAF was deployed in front of Amazon CloudFront distributions serving the eLearning platform, Application Load Balancers for backend APIs, and Amazon API Gateway endpoints. This setup ensures inspection and protection across static content, dynamic web apps, and API services.
WAF-002 Mapping:
This workload is categorized under ‘Custom Security Application’ per WAF-002 definitions.
Automation & Continuous Improvement (WAF-003):
AWS WAF rules are managed through AWS CloudFormation templates for version control and repeatable deployments. An automation pipeline updates IP sets weekly from threat intelligence feeds and applies tuning adjustments based on AWS WAF logs analyzed in Amazon Athena.
Implementation Details:
Managed Rule Groups: AWS Managed Core Rule Set, AWS Managed Bot Control, AWS Managed SQLi/XSS Rules- Custom Rules: Application-specific regex pattern matching, geolocation blocking for non-operational regions- WebACL Capacity Units (WCU): 1,800- Priority Settings: Managed rules first, custom rules after- Logging: AWS WAF full request logging to Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose, stored in Amazon S3 for analysis
Before deployment: 18% of requests were malicious, resulting in an average of 3 security incidents/month.
After deployment: 99.2% of malicious requests blocked, security incidents reduced to near-zero, and application latency decreased by 12% due to faster filtering.
Curious how AWS WAF could fit into your security stack? Let’s schedule a quick call to map out a tailored protection plan.
Little Sponges implemented AWS WAF as part of a custom security application to protect critical eLearning workloads from a variety of web-based threats. The deployment targeted both known OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities and custom application-specific attack vectors identified during the security assessment.
