A distributed web application is installed across several EC2 instances in public subnets residing in two Availability Zones. Apache logs show several intermittent brute-force attacks from hundreds of IP addresses at the layer 7 level over the past six months.
What would be the BEST way to reduce the potential impact of these attacks in the future?

A. Use custom route tables to prevent malicious traffic from routing to the instances.
B. Update security groups to deny traffic from the originating source IP addresses.
C. Use network ACLs.
D. Install intrusion prevention software (IPS) on each instance.