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Corporate Culture 12 May 2021 👁 48 views

Why Least Privilege Security Is a Lie: 3 Root Causes

In technology, there is a tendency to solve a problem badly by using gross simplification, then come up with a catchy one liner and then broadcast this as doctrine or a principle. Nothing ticks more boxes in this regard, than the principle of least privileges. The ensuing enterprise scale deadlocks created by a crippling implementation […]

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Public Cloud 23 Mar 2021 👁 29 views

AWS S3 ETags: Verify File Integrity Using MD5 Hashes

I was playing with S3 the other day an I noticed that a file which I had uploaded twice, in two different locations had an identical ETag. This immediately made me think that this tag was some kind of hash. So I had a quick look AWS documentation and this ETag turns out to be […]

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Public Cloud 10 Mar 2021 👁 39 views

SSH EC2-User Login Fix for WordPress Bitnami Instances

So after getting frustrated (and even recreating my ec2 instances) due to a “Permission denied (publickey)”, I finally released that the worpress builds by default as set up for SSH using the bitnami account (or at least my build was). This means each time I login using ec2-user I get: Being a limited human being, […]

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Cyber 25 Feb 2021 👁 36 views

SYN Flood Testing with hping3: A Practical Guide

Getting an application knocked out with a simple SYN flood is both embarrassing and avoidable. Its also very easy to create a SYN flood and so its something you should design against. Below is the hping3 command line that I use to test my services against SYN floods. I have used quite a few mods, […]

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Corporate Culture 29 Jan 2021 👁 23 views

The Triplication Paradigm: Why Removing Duplication Fails

Introduction In most large corporates technology will typically report into either finance or operations. This means that it will tend to be subject to cultural inheritance, which is not always a good thing. One example of where the cultural default should be challenged is when managing IP duplication. In finance or operations duplication rarely yields any benefits […]

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