My third annual pre:Invent roundup is posted over on Steampipe’s blog. You can also check out 2021 and 2020 if you’re so inclined.
Back in 2018, I wrote a semi-serious post on what you as a security practitioner should be looking for as it relates to re:Invent announcements.
There were a few hot-takes that didn’t warrant mention on my work post, so I’ll include them here for your general amusement.
It’s pre:Invent 2022, the time of year AWS releases a bunch of new products and features that aren’t big enough to make it on the keynote state of re:Invent. One of my long-awaited features was released last night: CloudFormation support for AWS Organizations!
Before this release, the management of Service Control Policies, Organizational Units, and AWS Accounts was either artisanal or via third-party tools like org-formation. I can finally manage my AWS Organization using the same IaC as I manage the accounts in that organization.
I feel like the phrase “disruptor” is an overused, Valley-Bro trope. However I can’t think of a better phrase to describe Tailscale, and what it will do to the enterprise firewall and VPN market for the security 99%.
My latest post at Steampipe.io is Enrich Splunk events with Steampipe . This was a fun one to write because it was a culmination on my recent IR work at BSides Atlanta and BSides Augusta.
I’ve written some crazy contraptions to get this stuff into Splunk, and I’ve got to say, Steampipe made it super easy.
I got a bug to tell everyone about the sessions I’m looking forward to at re:Invent this year. Check it out.
At BSides Atlanta today I gave a talk on how to handle an incident in AWS. The talk and this post is intended to help those already familiar with the principles of Incident Response to understand what to do when the incident involves the AWS Control Plane. You can find the Slides here.
A cheerful ghost of cloud security yet to come. I’ll talk about where CloudSec really needs to focus - on the pipeline and ultimately on the cloud developer or engineer. Finally, I’ll close out with a one-year roadmap for how I’d build a third (fourth) program if I’m crazy enough to do this again at my next job.
Following up on the Tar-Pit of CSPM, I feel the need to offer something more constructive for CloudSecurity practitioners to do. Cloud Security Posture Monitoring is “here’s a spreadsheet of issues, go fix them”. There are other ways, but none of them are a panacea.
It’s been a little less than five years since I moved from a media production cloud nerd to a cloud security nerd. As I ponder what I’m going to do next, I want to reflect on some of the things I got right and some that didn’t work out as expected.
The Southeast Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition is an annual competition where eight teams from various colleges have to defend their systems from Red Team attacks while also executing on management-type business challenges.
This is my second year helping Kennesaw State University run the SECCDC in AWS. This year we not only ran the Regional competition on-site at KSU, but we also hosted 26 teams for the preliminary round. In previous years the scenario was HALCORP, a fictional company that did nothing but generate compliance paperwork.
