The Problem
Political marketing campaigns generate concentrated traffic surges during key moments — elections, debates, fundraising drives. Without intelligent filtering, bad actors exploit those surges to flood webhooks, scrape pricing endpoints, and submit fake leads at scale. Pop Acta was seeing thousands of malicious requests per hour, burning compute budget and corrupting the campaign analytics their clients depended on to make real-time decisions.
How We Solved It
We instrumented all public-facing endpoints with a layered AWS WAF ruleset: IP reputation lists from AWS Managed Rules, rate-based rules per IP and per session, SQL injection and XSS protection, and a custom CAPTCHA challenge on high-value form submissions. A Lambda function subscribed to WAF CloudWatch metrics automatically blocks repeat offenders without manual intervention. The entire ruleset is managed in Terraform, making updates zero-touch and fully auditable. ALB access logs ship to S3 for retroactive threat analysis and forensics.
What We Delivered
- 90%+ reduction in spam traffic
- Real-time threat blocking capabilities
- Scalable infrastructure ready for campaign surges