AWS WAF FAQs

Managed Rules are an easy way to deploy pre-configured rules to protect your applications common threats like application vulnerabilities like OWASP, bots, or Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE). AWS Managed Rules for AWS WAF are managed by AWS, whereas Managed Rules from AWS Marketplace is managed by third-party security sellers.

You can subscribe to a Managed Rule provided by a Marketplace security Seller from the AWS WAF console or from the AWS Marketplace. All subscribed Managed Rules will be available for you to add to an AWS WAF web ACL.

Yes, you can use Managed Rules along with your custom AWS WAF rules. You can add Managed Rules to your existing AWS WAF web ACL to which you might have already added your own rules.

The number of rules inside a Managed Rule does not count towards your limit. However, each Managed Rule added to your web ACL will count as 1 rule.

You can add a Managed Rule to a web ACL or remove it from the web ACL anytime. The Managed Rules are disabled once you disassociate a Managed Rule from any web ACLs.

AWS WAF allows you to configure a “count” action for a Managed Rule, which counts the number of web requests that are matched by the rules inside the Managed Rule. You can look at the number of counted web requests to estimate how many of your web requests would be blocked if you enable the Managed Rule.

Yes, you can configure CloudFront to present a custom error page when requests are blocked. Please see the CloudFront Developer Guide for more information

After an initial setup, adding or changing to rules typically takes around a minute to propagate worldwide.

AWS WAF includes two different ways to see how your website is being protected: one-minute metrics are available in CloudWatch and Sampled Web Requests are available in the AWS WAF API or management console. These allow you to see which requests were blocked, allowed, or counted and what rule was matched on a given request (i.e., this web request was blocked due to an IP address condition, etc.). For more information see the AWS WAF Developer Guide.

AWS WAF allows you to configure a “count” action for rules, which counts the number of web requests that meet your rule conditions. You can look at the number of counted web requests to estimate how many of your web requests would be blocked or allowed if you enable the rule.

Real-Time Metrics are stored in Amazon CloudWatch. Using Amazon CloudWatch you can configure the time period in which you want to expire events. Sampled Web Requests are stored for up to 3 hours.

Yes. AWS WAF helps protect applications and can inspect web requests transmitted over HTTP or HTTPS.

Account Takeover Prevention (ATP) is a managed rule group that monitors traffic to your application’s login page to detect unauthorized access to user accounts using compromised credentials. You can use ATP to prevent credential stuffing attacks, brute force login attempts, and other anomalous login activities. As login attempts are made to your application, ATP checks in real time whether the user names and passwords submitted have been compromised elsewhere on the web. Checking for anomalous login attempts coming from bad actors, ATP correlates requests seen over time to help you detect and mitigate brute force attempts and credential stuffing attacks. ATP also offers optional JavaScript and iOS/Android SDKs that can be integrated into your application to provide you with additional telemetry on user devices that attempt to log in to your application to better protect your application against automated login attempts by bots.

Traffic between user devices and your application is secured by the SSL/TLS protocol that you configure for the AWS service you use to front your application, such as Amazon CloudFront, Application Load Balancer, Amazon API Gateway, or AWS AppSync. Once a user credential reaches AWS WAF, AWS WAF inspects the credential and then immediately hashes and discards it, and the credential never leaves the AWS network. Any communication between AWS services you use in your application and AWS WAF is encrypted in transit and at rest.

Bot Control gives you visibility and control over common and pervasive bot traffic that can consume resources, skew metrics, cause downtime, and perform other undesired activities. Bot Control checks various header fields and request properties against known bot signatures to detect and categorize automated bots, such as scrapers, scanners, and crawlers.

Account Takeover Prevention (ATP) gives you visibility and control over anomalous login attempts from bad actors using compromised credentials, helping you prevent against unauthorized access that may lead to fraudulent activity. ATP is used to protect your application’s login page.

Bot Control and ATP can be used independently of each other or used together. As with Bot Control managed rule groups, you can use ATP’s default rule action to block matching requests, or you can customize the behavior of ATP using AWS WAF mitigation functionality.

On the AWS WAF console, create a new web ACL, or modify an existing web ACL if you are using AWS WAF already. You can use the wizard to help you configure basic settings, such as which resource you want to protect and which rules to add. When prompted to add rules, select Add Managed Rules and then select Account Creation Fraud Prevention from the list of managed rules. To configure ATP, enter the URL of your application’s login page and indicate where the user name and password form fields are located within the request’s body.

JavaScript and Mobile SDKs provide additional telemetry on user devices that attempt to log in to your application to better protect your application against automated login attempts by bots. You do not need to use one of the SDKs, but we recommend that you do so for additional protection.

When ATP determines that a user’s credential has been compromised, it generates a label to indicate a match. By default, AWS WAF automatically blocks login attempts that are determined to be malicious or anomalous (for example, abnormal levels of failed login attempts, repeat offenders, and login attempts from bots). You can change how AWS WAF responds to matches by writing AWS WAF rules that act on the label.

Account Creation Fraud prevention (ACFP) is a paid managed rule group that allows you to detect and mitigate fake account creation attack against your sign-up or registration page. You can use ACFP to prevent promotional or sign-up abuse, loyalty or rewards abuse and phishing. As new accounts sign-up, ACFP verifies each credential (i.e., username and password) submitted, email domains used, and other information like phone numbers, address fields entered in real-time and blocks the sign-up attempt if any of this information is considered stolen, or has bad reputation. In addition, ACFP includes fraud risk predictions that you can use without requiring any deep knowledge of ML-based detection models. ACFP also offers recommended JavaScript and iOS/Android SDKs that can be integrated into your application to provide you with additional telemetry on user to better protect your application against automated login attempts by bots.

Account Takeover attacks an application’s sign-in page with a goal of gaining unauthorized access to an existing account, whereas account creation fraud targets the application’s sign-up page with a goal of committing fraud through these fake accounts. ATP is focused on preventing credential stuffing and brute force attacks, where attackers automate hundreds of login attempts, testing stolen credentials across multiple sites. Instead, ACFP focuses on preventing automated fraud such as promotional or sign-up abuse, loyalty or rewards abuse and phishing. ACFP and ATP can be used independently of each other or used together.

On the AWS WAF console, create a new web ACL, or modify an existing web ACL if you are using AWS WAF already. You can use the wizard to help you configure basic settings, such as which resource you want to protect and which rules to add. When prompted to add rules, select Add Managed Rules and then select Account Takeover Prevention from the list of managed rules. To configure ACFP, enter the URL of your application’s account creation and registration page. In addition, you can also indicate where the user name, password, address, and phone number form fields are located within the request’s body.

Optional but highly recommended. SDK integration provides additional information such as browser versions, plugins and canvas data that increases the efficacy of ACP rules. If SDK integration is not used, we enforce this using Challenge action. Challenge action does not work well with Single page applications (SPA) and Native Mobile apps, so for these applications, SDK integration is mandatory. For other apps that can withstand a page refresh such as HTML pages, SDK integration is optional. We support JS SDK for web applications, and Android and iOS SDK for native mobile applications.

You can observe how ACFP is protecting your application by reviewing the Fraud Dashboard on the console, WAF full logging, and CloudWatch Metrics.

Dashboard: A centralized dashboard for monitoring requests analyzed by ACFP and ATP CloudWatch Metrics: All rule actions with the ACFP rule group will emit CloudWatch Metrics that customers can use to create alerts and notifications.

WAF Logging: All requests analyzed by ACFP will be logged in WAF logs, so You can use the existing logging solutions to query and analyze logs for ACFP managed rule. ACFP will log details such as rule actions, label information and risk scoring, which can be used to track efficacy of ACFP.