Demystifying DDoS Attacks and CloudFront: A DevSecOps Guide
Tags: devops, aws, cloud, security
Published: 2023-07-21 10:49:11

The IT industry is currently facing the worst crisis in its history, with numerous factors affecting its stability. One significant factor that demands attention is the rising number of DDoS attacks. According to the [reports](https://www.radware.com/newsevents/pressreleases/2023/radware-full-year-2022-report-malicious-ddos-attacks/) available to me, there was a 150% increase in DDoS attacks in 2022 compared to 2021. Moreover, experts predict a continued upward trend in the upcoming years.

Attacks such as DDoS can have a significant impact on organizations, causing service disruptions, financial losses, reputation damage, data loss, increased vulnerability to other attacks, and more.

In today's digital landscape, understanding and mitigating DDoS attacks is crucial for DevSecOps professionals. In this blog post, we'll explore the intricacies of DDoS attacks and how CloudFront, Amazon Web Services' (AWS) content delivery network (CDN) service, can be a valuable tool in protecting your applications and infrastructure. By answering key questions along the way, we'll unravel the mysteries surrounding DDoS attacks and equip you with the knowledge to fortify your systems.

## What do you need to know about DDoS attackt as DevSecOps?
A DDoS attack, or distributed denial-of-service attack, is a cyber-attack that targets a website or server by flooding it with so much traffic that it becomes unavailable to legitimate users. The goal of a DDoS attack is to disrupt the targeted website or server's services, making it inaccessible to users.

There are two main types of DDoS attacks: volume-based attacks and application-layer attacks. Volume-based attacks flood the target with a large amount of traffic, overwhelming its resources and making it unable to handle legitimate requests. Application-layer attacks exploit vulnerabilities in the targeted website or server's applications, causing them to crash or malfunction.

To launch a DDoS attack, the attacker first identifies the target website or server. Then, they gather a large number of infected computers, called "zombies," to flood the target with traffic. This overwhelms the website or server, making it unable to handle legitimate requests. As a result, users are unable to access the website or server.

## How can CloudFront help with hosting and DDoS attackts?
CloudFront is a content delivery network (CDN) service that speeds up the delivery of your content to users all over the world by caching your content in edge locations. These edge locations are servers that are located close to your users. When a user requests your content, CloudFront delivers it from the edge location that is closest to them, which reduces latency and improves performance.

As most requests are answered by the edge location (from the cache), this significantly reduces the load on the origin server. The edge location acts as an absorbing agent, preventing requests from reaching the origin server directly, as they only need to pass through the edge location.

## Why do you need to have WAF protection enabled for CloudFront distribution?
As discussed above, DDoS attacks rely on "zombies" to attack. Therefore, blocking the requests from IP addresses of zombie machines can help us to stop DDoS attacks.

A web application firewall (WAF) serves as a protective layer in front of web applications, shielding them from common web exploits. WAFs function by inspecting HTTP requests and blocking those that match known attack patterns.

CloudFront has a built-in integration with WAF, which implies that if WAF is enabled for any CloudFront distribution, AWS will automatically create and handle the WAF Rules for you. These rules include the following:

1. Protect against the most common vulnerabilities found in web applications.
2. Protect against malicious actors discovering application vulnerabilities.
3. Block IP addresses from potential threats based on Amazon internal threat intelligence.

After enabling WAF for a CloudFront distribution, it would appear similar to the below image.

![WAF for a CloudFront distribution](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/k6lb2kaoy4zy9gs3hxhk.png)

## How to setup logging for CloudFront?
Before delving into the process of setting up logging, let's first understand why logging is crucial. Logging plays a pivotal role in enabling you to identify the source of an attack, mitigate the attack, and prevent future attacks.

You can easily set up logging with just one click to send your logs to CloudWatch, S3, or Kinesis Data Firehose. Among these options, S3 is the most cost-effective choice.

## Bonus
Utilize Athena to query data from any S3 bucket. It is recommended to use separate S3 buckets for different environments as this will enhance Athena's performance.

## Conclusion
By delving into the above subtopics, we've gained a comprehensive understanding of DDoS attacks and how CloudFront can fortify your DevSecOps practices. Armed with this knowledge, you're better equipped to protect your applications and infrastructure against potential threats. Stay vigilant, stay informed, and leverage the power of CloudFront to bolster your defenses.