Hey Folks 👋

✨ Introduction It starts with an innocuous-looking email. The sender claims to be AWS Support, warning the recipient about an urgent security issue. A single button labeled “Launch Stack” is prominently placed, urging immediate action. What appears to be a standard security advisory is, in reality, the gateway to a sophisticated AWS account takeover attempt. Threat actors are exploiting AWS CloudFormation StackSets in phishing campaigns designed to compromise AWS environments. Originally reported by Rami McCarthy back in 2022 and by Scott Piper in this blogpost (2021), this technique continues to evolve, demonstrating how adversaries leverage AWS automation against its own users. ...

Busy Holidays? You’ll find below my preferred papers from this summer, 2024 🏖️ Cloud Security Holding Cloud Vendors to a Higher Security Bar An AWS IAM Security Tooling Reference [2024] AWS Organizations Viewer Are my AWS Resources Encrypted or Unencrypted by Default? Strategies for performing security migrations Infrastructure Continuous reinvention: A brief history of block storage at AWS DNS best practices for Amazon Route 53 Introducing Parameter Store cross-account sharing Engineering The Over-Engineering Trap Anyone can Access Deleted and Private Repository Data on GitHub That’s all, folks! 👋🏼 ...

Background I started my career in the glass industry as a SysAdmin, specifically in a glass factory crafting fragrance bottles and bottles for pharmaceutical industries in the north of France. Since then, I’ve focused on IT security and cloud computing. After many full-time positions for Microsoft, French Logistic Railroad, and IT Consulting parties, I decided to run my AWS consulting boutique by myself 5 years ago. Just at the beginning of the pandemic, what a visionary… ...

Purpose Recently, I was working on a centralized explicit proxy service for one of my customers using a well-known Squid Internet proxy. The infrastructure is built on top of a shared AWS account hosting all standard infrastructure services, such as Internet Proxy, SOCKS5 Proxy, DNS Resolvers, ADDC, Centralized logging, and much more. Consumers are using the Internet Proxy service from multiple child AWS accounts and regions within the client AWS Organization thanks to AWS PrivateLink. ...

Following a post from my friend Julien Delange (Tech Ramblings) on software over-engineering, I want to share my thoughts about over-architecting in my preferred field of Public Cloud Architecture. Background I have been doing Cloud Architecture for more than ten years and have seen many different scenarios and use cases, from startups to GAFAM and multiple company verticals, from TV audience measurement to Gambling and Energy Producers. I also frequently challenge my fellow architects’ decisions. ...