Here is a detailed summary of the video transcription in markdown format, with the key takeaways broken down into sections for better readability:
Understanding Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks
- DDoS attacks are volumetric attacks - a flood of requests or packets against a public endpoint that can overwhelm an application, typically from many IP sources.
- The intention of such attacks is to take a service offline or degrade its performance.
- DDoS attacks commonly target the network or transport layer, but have now shifted more towards layer 7 HTTP request floods.
- AWS sees around 2,000 DDoS attacks per day, ranging from short-lived, high-volume attacks to prolonged attacks with multiple vectors.
- DDoS attacks can impact customers by causing DNS resolution issues, 5xx errors, and increased latency.
Mitigating DDoS Attacks
Initial Triage and Preparation
- Establish roles and responsibilities for the incident response team.
- Reach out to AWS Support, Enterprise Support, or your AWS account team for assistance.
- Enable logging and monitoring (CloudTrail, CloudWatch, Route 53 health checks) to get visibility into the environment.
Implementing Mitigation Strategies
- Use Route 53 for highly available DNS service to handle high DNS traffic.
- Implement CloudFront to offload traffic from the origin and perform protocol and packet inspection.
- Restrict the Application Load Balancer (ALB) to only accept traffic from CloudFront IP addresses.
- Configure CloudFront caching, error caching, and Geo-blocking to reduce the load on the backend.
- Enable AWS WAF directly from the CloudFront dashboard to add security rules and rate-based controls.
- Implement fine-grained rate-based controls using API Gateway aggregate keys or a combination of host header, URI path, and IP address.
- Consider using a JavaScript challenge for web content to distinguish between legitimate users and bots.
- Analyze AWS WAF logs to understand the traffic patterns and fine-tune the rules accordingly.
Monitoring and Post-Incident Review
- Add key metrics to the operations dashboard, such as CloudFront request rates, error rates, and health check status.
- Determine the criteria for when the incident is considered over (e.g., healthy health checks, expected load).
- Investigate logs for any further issues and amend rules as needed.
- Document any changes made to the infrastructure and plan for future mitigations.
AWS DDoS Mitigation Capabilities
AWS Shield Standard
- AWS Shield Standard is the first line of defense against DDoS attacks, sitting in-line with the traffic at the Edge and Regional locations.
- It identifies top talkers, applies intelligent rate limits, protects against known threats, and performs protocol-level mitigations.
- It is designed to maximize throughput and minimize bad traffic, preventing attacks from reaching customer workloads.
AWS CloudFront
- CloudFront provides additional DDoS protection at the layer 7 level, looking at both IP and request-level anomalies.
- It uses techniques like top talker identification, known threat protection, and request entropy analysis to detect and mitigate layer 7 DDoS attacks.
- CloudFront has demonstrated the ability to absorb massive DDoS attacks, such as the 155 million RPS HTTP/2 Rapid Reset attack.
AWS Threat Intelligence
- AWS uses a global network of "Honey Pots" to gather first-party, verifiable threat intelligence, which is then used to mitigate known threats across its services.
- This threat intelligence is used to identify and block malicious IP addresses, proxies, and other indicators of compromise.
- AWS also uses this intelligence to disrupt threat actors by providing information to take down botnets and other malicious infrastructure.
Building DDoS-Resilient Architectures
- Leverage AWS services like CloudFront, AWS WAF, and AWS Shield Advanced to build a layered defense-in-depth strategy.
- Use AWS Firewall Manager to manage and scale your WAF policies and security group rules across your organization.
- Implement a combination of rate-based controls, IP reputation lists, and customer-managed rules in AWS WAF.
- Regularly review and update your WAF rule sets, and conduct DDoS and penetration testing to validate the effectiveness of your controls.
- Engage with AWS support teams to help review your architecture and incident response processes.
Key QR codes to remember:
- DDoS Resiliency Guide
- AWS WAF Logging and Dashboarding Examples
- DDoS for Resiliency Best Practices