I’ve walked into more than one “secure” startup only to find their crown jewels—the production database—exposed to the world with a publicly_accessible = true flag. The engineers usually give me the same line: “Don’t worry, the security group is locked down to our office IP.” That’s not security; it’s a landmine waiting for one compromised…
Last week, I laid out a pretty prescriptive blueprint for a least-privilege IAM strategy in AWS. The feedback was exactly what I expected. It split into two camps. The first camp said, “Finally. A real-world pattern we can actually implement.” They got it. They understood that strict controls, when paired with a reliable escape hatch,…
I’ve seen it happen more times than I can count. I’ll walk into an organization using Azure, and the subscription looks like a digital Wild West. Every developer, contractor, and their dog has the Contributor role assigned at the subscription scope. Then comes the inevitable horror story: a simple script meant to clean up a…
I’ve walked into more than one new consulting gig to find the AWS account is a minefield of over-permissioned IAM users. It usually starts with a familiar, stomach-dropping story. A junior engineer, armed with PowerUserAccess, tries to terminate a test instance and accidentally nukes a production database because of a typo in a script. Or…