I wrote about automating application security testing in my previous blog. If you host your application or API on AWS and would like an additional layer of protection agains web attacks, you should consider using AWS Web Application Firewall (WAF).
It is relatively easy to set up and Amazon kindly provide some preconfigured rules and tutorials. AWS WAF is deployed in front of CloudFront (your CDN) and/or Application Load Balancer and inspects traffic before it reaches your assets. You can create multiple conditions and rules to watch for.
If you’ve been configuring firewalls in datacentres before the cloud services became ubiquitous, you will feel at home setting up IP match conditions to blacklist or whitelist IP addresses. However, AWS WAF also provides more sophisticated rules for detecting and blocking known bad IP addresses, SQL Injections and Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks.
Additionally, you can chose to test your rules first, counting the times it gets triggered rather than setting it to block requests straight away. AWS also throw in a standard level of DDoS protection (AWS Shield) with WAF at no extra cost, so there is really no excuse not to use it.
Cyber Security Leadership 
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