AWS Shield Cheat Sheet

• A managed Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection service that safeguards applications running on AWS.

Shield Tiers and Features

• Standard
  • All AWS customers benefit from the automatic protections of Shield Standard.
  • Shield Standard provides always-on network flow monitoring which inspects incoming traffic to AWS and detect malicious traffic in real-time.
  • Uses several techniques like deterministic packet filtering, and priority based traffic shaping to automatically mitigate attacks without impact to your applications.
  • When you use Shield Standard with CloudFront and Route 53, you receive comprehensive availability protection against all known infrastructure attacks.
  • You can also view all the events detected and mitigated by AWS Shield in your account.
• Advanced
  • Shield Advanced provides enhanced detection, inspecting network flows and also monitoring application layer traffic to your Elastic IP address, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFront, or Route 53 resources.
  • It handles the majority of DDoS protection and mitigation responsibilities for layer 3, layer 4, and layer 7 attacks.
  • You have 24×7 access to the AWS DDoS Response Team. To contact the DDoS Response Team, customers will need the Enterprise or Business Support levels of AWS Premium Support.
  • It automatically provides additional mitigation capacity to protect against larger DDoS attacks. The DDoS Response Team also applies manual mitigations for more complex and sophisticated DDoS attacks.
  • It gives you complete visibility into DDoS attacks with near real-time notification via CloudWatch and detailed diagnostics on the “AWS WAF and AWS Shield” Management Console.
  • Shield Advanced comes with “DDoS cost protection”, a safeguard from scaling charges as a result of a DDoS attack that cause usage spikes on your AWS services. It does so by providing service credits for charges due to usage spikes.
  • It is available globally on all CloudFront and Route 53 edge locations. 
  • With Shield Advanced you will be able to see the history of all incidents in the trailing 13 months.

Other Additional Features

• You can scan Amazon S3 buckets across multiple AWS accounts, and perform scoping of scans by object prefix.
• An estimation of the costs of these job runs is sent to you for review before you run them.
• Once a job is submitted, findings are generated in the Amazon Macie console and sent out through Amazon EventBridge where sensitive data location information is included in the findings. This allows for identification of sensitive data within objects using detail such as line numbers, page numbers, record index, or column and row numbers.

AWS Shield Pricing

• Shield Standard provides protection at no additional charge.
• Shield Advanced, however, is a paid service. It requires a 1-year subscription commitment and charges a monthly fee, plus a usage fee based on data transfer out from CloudFront, ELB, EC2, and AWS Global Accelerator.

Note: If you are studying for the AWS Certified Security Specialty exam, we highly recommend that you take our AWS Certified Security – Specialty Practice Exams and read our Security Specialty exam study guide.

AWS Shield Cheat Sheet References:

https://aws.amazon.com/shield/features/
https://aws.amazon.com/shield/pricing/
https://aws.amazon.com/shield/faqs/