Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) is an attack that can be used to make your application issue arbitrary HTTP requests. SSRF is used by attackers to proxy requests from services exposed on the internet to un-exposed internal endpoints. SSRF is a hacker reverse proxy. These arbitrary requests often target internal network endpoints to perform anything from reconnaissance to complete account takeover.

If you have PostgreSQL or MySQL databases running behind NAT in multiple environments, this release of Teleport is worth downloading and playing with.

Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks allow an attacker to forge and submit requests as a logged-in user to a web application. CSRF exploits the fact that HTML elements send ambient credentials (like cookies) with requests, even cross-origin. Like XSS, to launch a CSRF attack the attacker has to convince the victim to either click on or navigate to a link.

Amazon’s AWS Systems Manager, better known as SSM to long-time AWS users, was announced at the end of 2017, replacing the similarly named EC2 Systems Manager that had launched a year prior. Similar to other AWS products, System Manager provides a broad spectrum of features instead of a focused and opinionated product.

Every cloud has its own identity and access management system. AWS and Google use a bunch of JSON files specifying various rules. Open source projects like Kubernetes support three concurrent access control models - attribute-based, role-based and a webhook access control, all expressed using YAML. Some teams are going as far as inventing their own programming language to solve this evergreen problem.