FEATURED POST
There’s been a ton of coverage of the recently discovered Capital One breach. I’m generally very skeptical when AWS security makes the news; so far, most “breaches” have been a result of the customer implementing AWS services in an insecure manner, usually by allowing unrestricted internet access and often overriding defaults to remove safeguards (I’m looking at you, NICE and Accenture and Dow Jones!). Occasionally, a discovered “AWS vulnerability” impacts a large number of applications in AWS – and it also impacts any similarly-configured applications that are *not* in AWS (see, for example, this PR piece…um,…
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Workspaces
As part of a talk I’m doing with Boston based Workbar. I’ve written an FAQ on Amazon Workspaces. Sign up here What is Workspaces? Workspaces is a Desktop as a Service (Daas) solution from Amazon Web Services. Its a hosted desktop in the cloud made for the enterprise. It allows end users to connect to…
Read More10 AWS Network Terms
AWS networking is probably the most important thing that people don’t want to think about. While networking on the cloud is similar to traditional on-premise, there are a few key differences. Here’s a few terms that people may or may not be familiar with: VPC – Stands for virtual private cloud. Essentially it’s a managed…
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Shifting Left with Vulnerability Management
Recently a friend of mine told me his company, in an effort to improve security, was launching a bug bounty program. I’m a huge fan of bug bounty programs, hiring professionals to test your code is a great way to find things you may have missed and lets your clients, employees and investors know that…
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What Really is DevOps?
When I started my career as a Systems Administrator, I thought that I would be doing that for my whole career. A few years later, I thought to myself, ”If I were to progress, what would be my next step?” After a little bit of research, I learned of a position called a DevOps Engineer.…
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Pritunl Zero
Pritunl is an open source OpenVPN and IPSec solution that comes with a somewhat popular VPN client. Pritunl Zero fills in a few more gaps by providing zero trust access to SSH and Web Services similar to products such as Akamai EAA and Zscaller. I installed an individual server using this guide. It was relatively…
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Capital One and EC2 – part 3
In two previous articles, I described how the Capital One breach took advantage of an EC2-specific function to obtain AWS credentials which were then used to obtain multiple files containing sensitive information. If you haven’t already done so, I’d encourage you to read parts one and two before continuing. You might also want to pull up the complaint for…
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Capital One and EC2 – part 2
In a previous post, I mentioned that the attack vector for the Capital One breach specifically targeted an EC2 feature. In this post, I’ll give my educated guesses about how the attack actually worked. [Note 1: if anyone happens to have any of the contents of the original gist then I’d love to get a look…
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Capital One and EC2 Hack – an Overview
There’s been a ton of coverage of the recently discovered Capital One breach. I’m generally very skeptical when AWS security makes the news; so far, most “breaches” have been a result of the customer implementing AWS services in an insecure manner, usually by allowing unrestricted internet access and often overriding defaults to remove safeguards (I’m…
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How to Set Up a YubiKey 5C
Yubi what? A YubiKey is Yubico hardware authentication device designed to achieve secure 2-factor authentication (2FA) for online services like AWS, computer logins, developer tools, password managers and other important data. The YubiKey combines hardware-based authentication and public key cryptography to eliminate account takeovers and provides the extra security you need. YubiKey’s were created by…
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Welcome aboard Bill Lumbot
Every morning I try to follow a checklist that I wrote. I read over resumes, check out PRs, check my email accounts, etc… One critical thing I do (or did) was checked to see who forgot to log their hours from the day before (or who left the timer running). Since we are a consultancy,…
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