Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

As flexible working arrangements become increasingly common across every industry, companies need secure, dependable ways to grant remote employees online access to company data, services, and applications. Productivity in today’s highly digital business environment depends upon employees being able to access the systems and information they need for work when needed, from any location.

In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, the tools designed to protect us can sometimes become our greatest vulnerabilities. This paradox is becoming evident as attackers increasingly target Check Point VPNs, exploiting them to gain initial access to corporate networks. Recent findings highlight a growing trend where cybercriminals are leveraging vulnerabilities in remote access VPNs, posing a significant risk to organizational security.

Firewall technology has mirrored the complexities in network security, evolving significantly over time. Originally serving as basic traffic regulators based on IP addresses, firewalls advanced to stateful inspection models, offering a more nuanced approach to network security. This evolution continued with the emergence of Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs), which brought even greater depth through data analysis and application-level inspection.

The Domain Name System (DNS) translates domain names (e.g., datadoghq.com) into IP addresses via a process called DNS resolution. This translation facilitates all kinds of network communication, from enabling web browsers to connect to a desired page without requiring users to remember IP addresses, to internal communication across private infrastructure, such as Kubernetes environments.

Distributed networks, including software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN), content delivery networks (CDNs), and secure access service edge (SASE) architectures have become integral to modern IT landscapes. They provide unparalleled performance, scalability, and flexibility, empowering businesses to operate seamlessly across geographical boundaries.

AWS WAF is a managed web application firewall that monitors network traffic to your AWS applications and resources. As a perimeter-based firewall, AWS WAF is designed to secure the boundaries between your applications and the public internet. This means that it’s capable of protecting all of the various elements of your AWS architecture, including Amazon API Gateways, load balancers, and Amazon CloudFront distributions.

In Part 1 of this series, we looked at how AWS WAF helps you monitor network traffic to AWS resources, as well as key metrics and logs for detecting WAF misconfigurations and malicious activity. In this post, we’ll walk through using AWS’s native tooling to query that data.

In Part 2 of this series, we looked at Amazon’s built-in monitoring services for AWS WAF activity and audit logs. In this post, we’ll demonstrate how Datadog complements your WAF’s existing protection and extends its capabilities to not only offer protection at the perimeter but also to the APIs and services within your network.