CLF-C02 Practice Question 25: DDoS Protection Tiers
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) · Test 3 · question 5 of 10
A media company's website runs behind Amazon CloudFront and an Application Load Balancer. After a large DDoS attack, its AWS bill spiked with extra data transfer charges. Leadership now wants expanded DDoS protection that includes automatic application layer (layer 7) DDoS mitigation, detailed real-time attack visibility, and cost protection in the form of service credits for attack-related charges. What should the company do?
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Answer:
AWS Shield Advanced is a paid subscription that adds to the protection every customer already has. For the resources you add to it, it provides automatic application layer DDoS mitigation (it manages AWS WAF rules in response to detected attacks), advanced real-time metrics and reports about events and attacks, and cost protection against bill spikes caused by a DDoS attack on protected resources, paid as Shield Advanced service credits. The subscription also covers standard AWS WAF charges for the protected resources.
Option A is the trap: Shield Standard is automatic and at no additional charge, and it defends against the most common network and transport layer attacks, but it offers no automatic layer 7 mitigation, no advanced attack reporting, and no cost protection. Option B, GuardDuty, detects threats by analyzing logs and raises findings; it does not mitigate DDoS traffic. Option C helps, rate-based rules can limit request floods, but WAF on its own provides neither the attack visibility nor the service credits that the stem requires.
References: AWS Shield Advanced capabilities and options; AWS Shield Standard overview