Why did I get hacked?
It's a question I get asked frequently. Friends and family have faced this numerous times. "My Facebook account got hacked! How did this happen?"
The personal website of Phil MassynΒΆ
PHP mySQL PDO guide
When coding in PHP, there are a few coding examples of how to securely connect to a database.
Accessing your EC2 instances securely
Cloud-native applications are certainly the way to go to maximize your cloud investment, however, for many organizations, redeveloping their in-house applications to be cloud-native can be a daunting (and expensive) exercise. So in many cases, it makes sense to lift-and-shift the on-prem servers to the cloud to utilize at least some of the benefits of cloud infrastructure.
Having those servers in the cloud is one thing, how do you connect securely to them to perform your support tasks?
PHP Security Guide
According to W3techs.com, at least 77.6% of websites run on PHP. PHP, like any programming language, if implemented incorrectly, can cause you a lot of headaches.
Authenticating with AWS Cognito from PHP
AWS Cognito is a service that handles user creation and authentication for your application, allowing you to focus on the key aspects of your application.
Privilege escalation risks in AWS
A privilege escalation risk is where a user account within a system has the ability to elevate their privileges to a higher level than what was originally intended. This can have disastrous consequences, particularly if you have an insider threat. This type of risk is not limited to insiders only. Any user account with the right permissions can result in unwanted elevated permissions.
The us-east-1 outage of 2021
December 7th 2021 saw an outage in the us-east-1 region of AWS. The outage had a significant impact, not just on AWS, but for many customers all around the world.
Security Hygiene
Security hygiene is the practice of maintaining a computer system, by ensuring the basic controls are executed on a regular basis. It is, at its core, a precautionary practice, sometimes may be seen as mundane, yet still critical to the safe operation of your IT system.
Password policies
Almost every company on the face of the planet has them... Password policies. They describe how long and complex they need to be, and how often you need to change them, much to the dismay of of your users. Let's talk about passwords. In this article, we will only cover the authentication side of the security model.
Hosting a static website on AWS
To try and keep my hosting costs down, I decided to redevelop AWSSecurity.info and publish it as a mkdocs site, instead of WordPress. This is allowing me to host the site on S3 with CloudFront, rather than keeping an EC2 instance active all the time.
In this post, I will share with you details of how I achieved this.