Protecting against targeted attacks
Throughout this chapter, we saw many tools and strategies to better secure our infrastructure against standard attacks. In some situations, like when someone purposefully tries to take your service down using Denial of Service (DOS) attacks or a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack, this might not be enough.
Protecting against DOS and DDOS attacks
In some cases, an attacker may try to target your service with a sophisticated attack.
The two most common attacks are:
- Volumetric attacks: where an attacker takes advantage of a botnet and overloads your servers with thousands and thousands of concurrent requests to the point that your servers are saturated.
- Layer 7 attacks: where an attacker tries to find a vulnerability in your application code and exploit it. The most common examples of layer 7 attacks are SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.
To protect your application against these types of attack, AWS provides a web application firewall...
