A focus on learning...

The holidays are a great time to focus on your education to further your career aspirations and re-energize you in your work. This holiday I decided to focus on diving in more deeply into AWS. In my daily job, I rarely get to put hands on the keyboard and dig into projects. My role is more advisory than ‘doing the thing’. However, digging into the details is something I love to do and have used these holidays on a couple of small projects.

The Firewall is DEAD… Long Live the Firewall!

I love firewalls!!! LOVE THEM!!!! I have this weird sense of power when I am setting one up, like I am standing at the gates protecting the village from the angry hoard of marauding thugs. I’m one of the good guys and you shall not pass!!! I know… super nerdy, but it is true. However, we need to talk about a reality affecting all security professionals. Next Gen Firewalls are becoming less helpful.

Running Pi-Hole in AWS

For those of you that may not be familiar with Pi-Hole, it is a DNS resolver that you run on your network to prevent adware. It operates very simply…. you point your clients to it for DNS, it compares that against a list of know tracking/ad sites. If it matches it fails to resolve the DNS query… if it doesn’t match it resolves DNS using an upstream provider. It also caches previous DNS queries, reducing lookup time by keeping it locally.

Scooter Gang is Coming!

I am so excited! I am waiting on my new e-scooter. Last week I ordered an Apollo Phantom v2 scooter and have the v3 upgrade on pre order. I’m pretty stoked. I’ll update you all when it arrives. In the meantime, let me know if you are in my area and want to do a ride (when it arrives)! UPDATE: My scooter has FINALLY shipped. When it arrives, it has will have taken a HALF A MONTH to get to my front door.

Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF)

During BlackHat and Defcon, AWS and others made a joint announcement around the creation of the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF). I’d encourage everyone to take a quick look at that announcement. Why I feel this is significant is really due to the companies that were involved in making this happen. This is a situation where industry leaders came together to create a framework that will be made available to everyone.

Using Lightsail for WordPress

For some time I had been running WordPress on a Raspberry Pi Zero. At first it was more of an experiment. I had wanted to first stand up a very basic webpage, but then thought… “I wonder if a Pi Zero could run WordPress”. The answer… it can… SLOWLY. Considering I expected zero traffic, this wasn’t a problem. Now, my ambitions have taken me further and the reality of how efficient and value driven the cloud is has been fully realized.

I moved the site to AWS!

I decided to go through the AWS experience myself. After hosting my website and other services from home, I jumped both feet into the AWS cloud. I’m around the cloud all day with my job, but I already had everything working at home. Already I have noticed how much faster this is and how little there is to worry about. More to come on my home network journey into the cloud!