Block IP addresses in WAF if the client caused an excessive amount of 404 errors

Hello.
Since AWS WAF judges by request, we believe that the WAF function alone cannot judge by response.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/waf/latest/developerguide/what-is-aws-waf.html

As you are aware, querying the logs and blocking the IP address would be one way to do this.

Hi Yarpen.

I may be wrong but I don't believe that is something WAF can do. From the documentation:

An AWS WAF rule defines how to inspect HTTP(S) web requests and the action to take on a request when it matches the inspection criteria. You define rules only in the context of a rule group or web ACL.

Based on that, note that WAF inspects web requests, not responses. It won't know that a request produced an HTTP 404 error.

You can define rules that inspect for criteria like the following:

• Scripts that are likely to be malicious. Attackers embed scripts that can exploit vulnerabilities in web applications. This is known as cross-site scripting (XSS).
• IP addresses or address ranges that requests originate from.
• Country or geographical location that requests originate from.
• Length of a specified part of the request, such as the query string.
• SQL code that is likely to be malicious. Attackers try to extract data from your database by embedding malicious SQL code in a web request. This is known as SQL injection.
• Strings that appear in the request, for example, values that appear in the User-Agent header or text strings that appear in the query string. You can also use regular expressions (regex) to specify these strings.
• Labels that prior rules in the web ACL have added to the request.

In addition to statements with web request inspection criteria, like the ones in the preceding list, AWS WAF supports logical statements for AND, OR, and NOT that you use to combine statements in a rule.

For example, based on recent requests that you've seen from an attacker, you might create a rule with a logical AND statement that combines the following nested statements:

• The requests come from 192.0.2.44.
• They contain the value BadBot in the User-Agent header.
• They appear to include SQL-like code in the query string.

What I think can work is, setup a CloudWatch Alarm for your desired 4xx error threshold and consume the alarms from EventBridge. Use EventBridge to trigger a Lambda function that examines the event and adjust the webACL to block the IP addresses.

I hope this helps.

To do this, you will have to rely on log analysis. Take a look at the Security Automations for AWS WAF solution. It includes a log parsing component which would align to what you're trying to do, and will potentially save you some time trying to build it yourself.