Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

September 2021

So You Want to Become a Sales Engineer?

Those of us that work with technology get this question a lot: “What do you do?” “I work in technology — more specifically, I work as a pre-sales engineer.” Sound familiar? Working in IT can mean a lot of different things, and to those outside of this world, it quickly becomes deeply technical and complicated to explain to non-IT people. Even explaining what you do to IT people can become complicated.

Do We Still Need a Bastion?

There is a growing discussion among network engineers, DevOps teams, and security professionals about the security benefits of bastions. Many assume that they are the “old way” of network access and have little relevance in the modern cloud native stack. These speculations are not irrelevant as in recent years, the corporate IT network perimeter as we knew it is diminishing, and the concept has been shifted to data, identity, and compute perimeter.

Anatomy of a Cloud Infrastructure Attack via a Pull Request

In April 2021, I discovered an attack vector that could allow a malicious Pull Request to a Github repository to gain access to our production environment. Open source companies like us, or anyone else who accepts external contributions, are especially vulnerable to this. For the eager, the attack works by pivoting from a Kubernetes worker pod to the node itself, and from there exfiltrating credentials from the CI/CD system.

Access Control Podcast: Episode 9 - SRE-Powered Dev Productivity

In this ninth episode of Access Control, a podcast providing practical security advice for startups, Developer Relations Engineer at Teleport Ben Arent chats with Mario Loria. Mario is a Senior SRE at Carta who has been leading their move to Kubernetes and other cloud native technologies. Carta helps companies and investors manage their cap tables, valuations, investments, and equity plans. As users of Carta, we hope their security is top notch. Today we’ll be chatting about orchestrating Kubernetes, training teams on cloud native, and optimizing for the developer experience!

Security Incident Containment with Teleport Session and Identity Locking

What would you do when a security incident is detected? Shut down the servers? Pull out the power cord from the data center? When an incident is detected, both the incident method and the time required to contain an incident are essential to limit the damage. The slower you are to react, the more damage an incident would incur. And a service downtime to contain an incident can cost businesses even more than a security incident itself.

Expert Advice on Starting a Career in Cybersecurity

Do you have what it takes to become a cybersecurity expert? We interviewed 3 security professionals to find out how they got their start and what advice they would give to someone starting their career in cybersecurity. With security threats increasing, much of business continuity has come to rely on data security. In particular, engineering teams building cloud software rely on access to an ever-growing number of computing resources.

Why Secure Access to Cloud Infrastructure is Painful

Can you enumerate every single network socket which can be used to hack into your cloud environment and steal your data? When counting, are you including the laptops of people who already authenticated and have access? The purpose of opening with this question is not to instill fear. Trying to answer it probably leads to “it’s complicated” and the complexity of access is what this article will cover. Complexity is our collective enemy in the computing industry.