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Product Specific DDoS Protection e.g. WAF

** Product Specific Denial-of-Service attack Protection e.g. via Web Application Filter**

Definition: Product-specific DDoS protection (e.g., via a WAF) refers to protecting individual applications, APIs, or user journeys rather than only defending the network edge. It focuses on how the product behaves under attack. Often done via WAF (Web Application filter) because it understands application semantics (unlike network DDoS protection (L3/L4)). Instead of “protect everything equally,” you protect critical product surfaces differently. Each endpoint has custom rules, limits, and fallbacks.

Key Steps: 1) Identify critical user journeys (CUJs) 2) Identify possible attack types and cost (CPU usage, DB queries, external calls) by endpoints 3) Define and implement protective countermeasures based on results (request validation & filtering, brute-force protection, credential stuffing protection etc.)

Benefits:

1. Reduces impact of attacks to specific endpoints
2. Improves user experience (fewer false blocks)
3. Saves backend resources (blocks expensive requests first)
4. Maintains revenue during incidents
5. Enables graceful degradation instead of full outage
6. Provides fine-grained, per-endpoint control
7. Speeds up detection and targeted response

Examples:

Related Tools and Products

1. Cloudflare:

• Website
• Description: Global Anycast CDN with Automatic always-on L3/L4 volumetric attack mitigation (no manual activation needed).

2. Google Cloud Armor:

• Website
• Description: A web application firewall (WAF) and DDoS protection service built into Google Cloud’s global load balancing infrastructure.

3. AWS Web Application Firewall:

• Website
• Description: A web application firewall (WAF) that provides basic filtering and WAF capabilities.

4. Microsoft Azure Web Application Firewall:

• Website
• Description: A web application firewall (WAF) that provides basic filtering and WAF capabilities.

Related Terms

Related Terms to Vanilla DDoS Protection:

These related terms are often used in conjunction with Vanilla DDoS Protection.

• Rate limiting Restricts how many requests a client can make in a given time window to prevent abuse and traffic spikes.

• Throttling Gradually slows down excessive traffic instead of blocking it outright, preserving partial service availability.

• IP filtering / ACLs Allows or blocks traffic based on IP addresses or ranges using firewall or router rules.

• Reverse proxy A proxy service that handles incoming requests and protects backend services.

• Load balancing Distributes traffic across multiple servers to avoid overload and improve availability.

• CDN (Content Delivery Network) Caches content and absorbs traffic at edge locations (e.g., Cloudflare).

• Firewall (L3/L4 filtering) Filters packets at the network level (e.g., iptables, security groups) before they reach applications.

• Auto-scaling Automatically adds or removes compute resources based on traffic load to handle spikes.

• Caching Stores responses to reduce backend load and improve response time under traffic pressure.

• Anycast routing Routes traffic to the nearest or least-loaded data center, helping distribute attack traffic globally.

Prerequisites

Before conducting Vanilla DDoS Protection, it is essential to have the following in place:

1. Clear definition of critical user journeys (CUJs): Identify high-priority flows (login, checkout, core APIs) and rank them by business impact and sensitivity 2. Layer 7 protection capability: Deploy a WAF — type: post —