The Comprehensive AWS Shield User Guide: Definition, How it Works, Best Benefits and more

Introduction

In 1996, the first known Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack occurred, targeting Panix, the oldest Internet Service Provider (ISP) in New York. SYN inundated their network, which remained online for a few days. DDoS attacks have increased in frequency over the ensuing years. By 2023, Cisco predicts that there will have been more than 15.4 million DDoS assaults, up from 7.9 million in 2018.

So how can you defend against these attacks on your websites and applications? Fortunately, there is a solution—AWS Shield that can help you in enhancing the general security of your company's data. Because AWS services are typically relatively simple to use and don't require management by a team of experienced people, businesses of all sizes can profit from employing them.

We will detail AWS Shield in this blog, including its main advantages, ramifications, and several forms. Consider enrolling in a professional AWS Online Certification Course today to take your career level!

Let's start with the basics first.

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What is AWS Shield?

AWS Shield is  a managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) prevention tool that protects applications running on AWS. It provides always-on monitoring and automatic inline mitigations that significantly minimize application downtime and latency. It is fantastic in dynamic detection and automatic inline mitigations, which helps minimize the application downtime and latency, so there is no need to engage AWS Support to get advantages from AWS DDoS protection.

DDoS attacks deliberately obstruct regular traffic by targeting servers or network infrastructures. They frequently succeed because they overwhelm the target's defenses by using different computers—usually hacked ones—as the attack's sources. DDoS attacks are among the most widespread, so having a special security service for them makes sense.

So, it was a quick overview of the AWS Shied definition. If you want to leverage your cloud career with Cloud Computing Training because it helps you gain in-depth knowledge from basic to advance level concepts in computing.

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There are Two Tiers of AWS Shield – Standard and Advanced

What are the Significant Advantages of AWS Shield?

AWS Shield is crucial in safeguarding the product from a wide range of known DDoS and zero-day attack vectors. Following are some key benefits of AWS Shield that show its significance in the digital world today and why the demand and salary of AWS professional skilled in AWS shield is high–  

Easy to use – Like other AWS products, AWS Shield is an easy-to-use platform that helps application providers, ISVs, and suppliers host your applications efficiently. You can also add the AWS Shield to new and already-existing Software as a Service-based applications by using the AWS administration portal. 

Cost-effective – Another advantage of AWS Shield is that it provides a completely free service to all current clients. The Advanced edition of AWS Shield is a premium service, but you only pay for what you use. Although the platform initially demands a one-year commitment, it is competitively priced thanks to its monthly subscription plan and alternatives for extending the resources. 

Customizable security – AWS Shield is a well-liked choice since it enables users to choose their preferred operating system, web application platform, database, and programming language; which resources and parts of your AWS setup you wish to utilize AWS Shield to protect is always up to you.

Traffic monitoring – AWS Shield actively examines the incoming network data and identifies malicious traffic using a combination of traffic signatures and other analysis techniques. 

Global threat dashboard – You can use the global threat dashboard to look up information on DDoS attacks against the Amazon Web Services network. This information can be found in the AWS Management Console's global threat dashboard. Through the console, the user can get information on the overall number of attacks, the severity of the attacks, the most common vector, etc.

 DDoS mitigation – Shield Standard can instantly identify and automatically mitigate over 99 percent of infrastructure layer threats.

 Hopefully, you are convinced of the advantages of AWS Shield. In the next section, we will take you through the process of how AWS Shield work, followed by a step-wise guide on setting up AWS Shield to your account. 

How does AWS Shield work?

A DDoS assault typically targets one system at a time and results in a denial of service. A DDoS attack aims to overwhelm a website or other online service with unneeded or unwanted traffic to render it inaccessible. DDoS assaults come in many forms, some of which are listed below:

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• Volumetric attacks: A website or online service is subjected to a volumetric assault when overloaded with traffic. It is accomplished by sending out fictitious inquiries and flooding the network with faked packets, ICMP floods, and UDP floods.
• Application and network attacks: In the application and network attacks, the attackers aim to bring down the web servers by bombarding them with GET/POST requests or DNS queries.
• State-exhaustion or protocol attacks: In a protocol attack, the attackers use exploits of protocols like the Ping of Death, Smurf DDoS, and fragmented packet attacks to first exhaust all the server resources. Attacks of this nature load load balancers and firewalls, causing the victim's website to crash.

As you need the right guidance to grow on your AWS Career Path, it's crucial to have the proper plan and tools to protect your website or application against such threats. The AWS Shield enters the picture at this point. It integrates with most AWS products, including Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon Cloud Front, and Amazon Route 53. Also, Amazon claims to defend its customers' networks from these DDoS attempts. 

AWS's infrastructure is built to be DDoS-resistant and strengthened with DDoS mitigation systems that can automatically detect and filter excess traffic around-the-clock as a defense against these attacks. AWS Shield enables companies to set up a web application firewall alongside it for increased protection.

Shield AWS further allows a corporation to create unique web access control lists (web ACLs) that can include rules for traffic inspection circumstances. Each rule has a matching action (allow, block, or count). Organizations can use the count mode to monitor traffic trends and choose whether to apply a particular rule in allow or block mode. One of the best instances of this is the rate-limiting feature. This function will automatically ban an IP address if it receives more than 2,000 requests in a five-minute period.

 This is how you can configure AWS Shield Advanced for your AWS resources. Also, become part of our JanBask Testing Community.  Access to all the capabilities, such as the AWS SRT (Shield Response Team), which can offer instant assistance during an assault, is not granted by membership alone (including proactive event response, i.e., they will start to mitigate the attack as soon as they notice it). To access additional SRT assistance, you need to ensuring for registering  for the Enterprise or Business support.

Conclusion

Attacks by DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) remain a significant risk for online enterprises. DDoS extortion is the practice of attackers using massive amounts of traffic to crash a victim's web applications from many sources. By utilizing the security of AWS Edge Services, such as Amazon CloudFront, AWS Shield Standard, and AWS Web Application Firewall, AWS Shield is incredibly beneficial to protect their websites and apps against all frequently known threats and exploits (AWS WAF). Master AWS skills to maximize the advantages of AWS Shield. Consider enrolling JanBask Training’s AWS Online Certification Course today!

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. What is AWS DDoS?

Ans:- Applications running on AWS are protected by the managed distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection service known as AWS Shield. There is no need to contact AWS Support in order to take advantage of DDoS protection because it also offers dynamic detection and automatic inline mitigations that reduce application downtime and latency.

Q2. Can AWS be used for DDoS?

Ans:- You can utilise AWS services like Amazon CloudFront and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to automatically block DDoS assaults on infrastructure layer targets. See AWS best practises for DDoS resiliency for further details. As the main mitigation for application layer threats, you can use AWS WAF.

Q3. Does AWS use firewall?

Ans:- Yes. For your virtual private cloud (VPC), which you constructed in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, AWS Network Firewall is a managed network firewall and intrusion detection and prevention service (Amazon VPC). You may quickly filter traffic at the edge of your VPC with Network

Q4. Is AWS Shield part of WAF? 

Ans:- Yes, the WAF component called AWS Shield is used to lessen the impact of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assault. AWS offers two types of DDoS prevention services: AWS Shield Standard and AWS Shield Advanced.

Q5.What is AWS Shield advanced?

Ans:- AWS Shield Advanced is a customized security solution that concentrates on investigating risks by combining data from all of AWS into exabyte-scale detection.

Q6. How do I put AWS Shield into use?

Ans:- AWS Shield can be used with any resource that is connected to the selected Elastic IP as a resource to be protected. Simply choose “Protected Resources” from the navigation bar after subscribing, click “Add resource to protect,” and then confirm your choice.

Q7. Does AWS offer DDoS defense?

Ans:- All AWS clients have access to the built-in security measures of AWS Shield Standard at no additional cost. AWS Shield Standard provides defense against the most common and typical network and transport layer DDoS attacks that are directed at your website or apps.

Q8. What is the AWS Shield advanced pricing?

Ans:- The AWS Shield pricing is $3,000 per organisation to use the AWS Shield Advanced.

Q9. Is AWS Shield standard free?

Ans:- You do not need to pay the AWS shield cost for standard level. The automatic security features of AWS Shield Standard are available to all AWS customers at no additional cost. The most typical, frequent network and transport layer DDoS attacks that target your website or apps are protected from by AWS Shield Standard.

Q10. What is covered under AWS Basic Support?

Ans:- The Resource Center, Service Health Dashboard, Product FAQs, Discussion Forums, and Support for Health Checks are all accessible to all AWS customers via AWS Basic Support at no of any additional charges.