Amazon launches DDoS protection service AWS Shield
Following the massive attack that took down the servers of the DNS service provider Dyn and a number of high profile websites including Netflix, Twitter, Spotify and Reddit last month, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a new technology to protect sites against distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
The new tool, which is called AWS Shield, was announced at the company's re:Invent developer event in Las Vegas. Amazon's own site was affected by the attack on Dyn and the company has now decided to launch its own DDoS protection service to ensure that its site and those that use AWS are able to withstand future attacks.
AWS Shield will be available in two levels with the first, called AWS Standard, providing users with basic integrated DDoS protection. It will be enabled by default for all AWS customers and those looking for further protection will be able to upgrade to the premium version of the service called AWS Shield Advanced.
AWS offers more details regarding the premium version of its DDoS protection service on its site, saying: "For higher levels of protection against attacks targeting your web applications running on Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Amazon CloudFront, and Amazon Route 53 resources, you can subscribe to AWS Shield Advanced. In addition to the common network and transport layer protections that come with Standard, AWS Shield Advanced provides additional detection and mitigation against large and sophisticated DDoS attacks, near real-time visibility into attacks, and integration with AWS WAF, a web application firewall".
During the announcement of AWS Shield, Amazon's chief technology officer Werner Vogels praised the new service, saying: "I think this will really help you protect yourselves even against the largest and most sophisticated attacks that we've seen out there.”
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