The personal website of Phil MassynΒΆ
The Uber Hack of 2022
It's been a wild year for Uber which has suffered through another security breach. The reactions to the hack have been mixed, and I've been contemplating how to respond. Here's my take...
Resilient Software Design
When you operate a large fleet of servers, patching your operating system and other software components is a necessary task to prevent malware and external threat actors from taking control of your system. In a number of cases, I've heard clients use the words: "I can't patch my system because it might cause an outage." Let's unpack this disturbing statement.
The root account
The AWS Root account is an absolute god user for your AWS account. This account must be kept secure, and only used in absolute emergencies. For an account that is so sensitive and secure, I was quite surprised that it is integrated into almost everything that Amazon does.
Privacy is not Security
While privacy and security are two concepts that closely follow each other, they are two different things. What exactly is the difference between these topics?
Digital Ocean is (probably not) better than AWS
Earlier this week, while browsing through my Twitter feed, I saw a post where someone was saying that Digital Ocean was better than AWS. Having used both of them extensively, the post caught my attention, and after reading through the comments, it became very clear to me that there was a huge misunderstanding between the two services. Let's break it down.
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?"
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?