waf

Shield Advanced is $3,000/mo per org plus DTO fees — for a consumer marketplace (~180M req/mo CloudFront), cost protection credited $41k in scaling charges after a 38-minute L7 event when WAF rate rules were pre-configured.

WAF beyond “enable managed rules”: COUNT→BLOCK, rate limits, Bot Control cost traps, GraphQL depth. July 2026 API protection checklist.

Billing attacks: CloudFront request floods, Lambda bombs, SQS/SNS OTP spam. July 2026 — WAF ceilings, reserved concurrency, Budgets Actions, FinOps backstops.

AWS WAF blocks attacks. It also blocks legitimate users when the rules are wrong — and that's a worse incident. Managed rule groups, custom rules, rate limiting, bot control, and the layered defense strategy that protects without flooding your support queue.