Posts
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Lessons learned from using AWS Data Pipeline
One of the projects I worked on last year had a requirement to sync daily snapshots of data from Amazon RDS to Amazon S3 in order to support other internal services that ingested from S3 data providers.
I decided to use AWS Data Pipeline since it seemed to be a good fit for our use cases and worked well in a proof-of-concept.
This turned out to be a less than ideal solution although it did the job, and I learned several lessons from the experience.
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Lessons learned from playing Go
Managing too many choices
Go forces us to ask ourselves those all-encompassing questions:
What should I do now?
What things are most important to me?
What should I be focusing on?
Or combined into a more immediate, actionable form: What is the most important thing for me to do right now?
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Investigating 'You don't have enough free space in /var/cache/apt/archives/' errors
I was recently having issues upgrading Debian Linux due to
You don't have enough free space in /var/cache/apt/archives/errors, and it took an hour or so to resolve the root cause of the issue (one program consuming far too much space). Hopefully this post will help cut down the debugging time for other people who run into this problem. -
Setting up secure AWS S3 buckets with CloudFormation
In this post I'll go over a few of the configuration settings that you can use to secure your S3 resources, with a base CloudFormation template at the end that you can play with and extend. -
Diving into the Essential Eight strategies to mitigate security incidents part 2: limiting blast radius and recovering
This is the second part of a deep dive into the Australian Cyber Security Centre’s Essential Eight mitigation strategies, following up on an overview of guides from the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), and a deep dive into the first four of the Essential Eight.
To recap, the Essential Eight are the ACSC’s top eight recommended strategies for mitigating security incidents. This post will focus on the last four mitigation strategies.
The Essential Eight are:
- Application whitelisting
- Patching applications
- Configuring Microsoft Office macro settings
- Hardening user applications
- Restricting administrative privileges
- Patching operating systems
- Multi-factor authentication
- Daily backups
For each of the highlighted strategies, I’ll review security controls from the Australian Information Security Manual (ISM), incremental steps to achieve them following the Essential Eight Maturity Model, and comments on the overall strategy.
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Living in Seattle or Vancouver on a budget
One of the most reliable ways to build financial security is to save part of every paycheck as soon as you’re able, so you can both enjoy life in the moment and handle whatever life throws your way.
It’s harder to save today than it was a few decades ago thanks to an inflated cost of living. However, if you’re earning $30k/year or more, there are practical ways to take control of the big things so that even in cities like Seattle and Vancouver, you can live well, build up an emergency fund, and begin saving for the future.
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Diving into the Essential Eight strategies to mitigate security incidents part 1: preventing delivery and execution of malware
I introduced some of the security guides published by the Australian Cyber Security Centre and their Essential Eight mitigation strategies for businesses in my last post, and I’d like to dive deeper into the first four mitigation strategies for preventing delivery and execution of malware.
The Essential Eight mitigation strategies:
- Application whitelisting
- Patching applications
- Configuring Microsoft Office macro settings
- Hardening user applications
- Restricting administrative privileges
- Patching operating systems
- Multi-factor authentication
- Daily backups
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Top mitigation strategies from the Australian Cyber Security Centre
The Australian Cyber Security Centre provides a substantial amount of clear and actionable information on how to improve an organization’s security posture, ranging from basic guides for organizations that are just establishing their security teams, to its regularly updated Australian Government Information Security Manual, often referred to as the ISM.
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