// Topics / Security
Security
46 entries tagged “Security”
- Your Coding Agent Inherits the Engineer
· 4 min
A coding agent inherits every credential the engineer holds and none of the judgment behind them. Close that gap with a runtime boundary, not a ban.
security
ai
operations
MCP Grew Up. Your Integration Debt Has a Clock.
· 4 min
The July MCP revision started a 12-month deprecation clock. Use it to find every agent-to-tool boundary, give each an owner, and test it.
ai
architecture
platform-engineering
The Eval Inversion
· 5 min
Two frontier labs lost containment this summer, in eval environments. The more adversarial the workload, the weaker the walls around it. Invert that.
ai
security
reliability
Shadow AI Is an Operating Problem, Not a Ban
· 4 min
Banning AI tools removes your visibility, not the tools. Make the governed path the fast path and pull usage into the control plane.
governance
ai
security
Agent Identity Is the New Control Plane
· 4 min
AI agents need workload identity, not shared API keys: SPIFFE SVIDs, RFC 8693 token exchange, and Vault leases make access scoped, attributable, revocable.
ai
reliability
security
Sovereignty-by-Design for AI: How to Win Regulated Enterprise Deals
· 4 min
AI data sovereignty an auditor can test: BYOK, in-region decryption, and which copies key revocation kills versus which need signed delete receipts.
ai
privacy
governance
AI Governance Without Bureaucracy
· 2 min
AI governance that works: tighter defaults, named owners, fast escalation, and a small control stack engineers can follow at 2 a.m. No new committees.
governance
ai
security
Data Sovereignty by Design: Privacy as Architecture
· 6 min
Data privacy and residency are architecture constraints. Four minimum controls, zero-trust data access, and multi-region tradeoffs to build in early.
privacy
security
compliance
Why AI Agents Fail on Legacy Network Infrastructure
· 7 min
Many AI agent failures trace to the network: stale DNS, flat trust, retry storms, shallow queues. Zero-trust identity and per-step reliability fix them.
agents
infrastructure
security
AI Security in 2026: Prompt Injection, Agents, and Defenses
· 6 min
Multi-step prompt injection and tool-based exfiltration target AI agents in 2026. The layered defenses, monitoring, and security review I use.
security
ai
production
AI Data Privacy Is a Plumbing Problem
· 5 min
AI privacy fails in the details: what gets logged, who can replay prompts, how long artifacts linger. Treat it as infrastructure, not a checkbox.
privacy
ai
data
AI Security: Prompt Injection and the New Attack Surface
· 5 min
AI systems are exposed APIs with real blast radius. The threats are injection, leakage, and tool misuse. The defenses are the ones we've always needed.
security
ai
production
AI Safety in Production Is Defense in Depth
· 5 min
Production AI safety works like cyber defense: assume breach, layer input, output, and system controls, and watch every boundary with real monitoring.
ai
governance
production
Enterprise AI Compliance Without the Theater
· 5 min
Enterprise AI compliance as architecture: a data inventory, model registry, audit logging, and risk tiers that let low-risk use cases ship in days.
ai
compliance
business
LLM Security: A Field Guide for People Who Ship Things
· 6 min
LLMs bring security failure modes most teams aren't defending against. Prompt injection, data leakage, tool abuse, and cost attacks are exploitable today.
security
llm
ai
Responsible AI Is Operational Risk Management
· 3 min
Responsible AI fails as a committee and works as risk management: know the blast radius, test the failures you fear, disclose AI use, name an owner.
ai
security
governance
AI Safety Is Just Security Engineering With Extra Steps
· 4 min
For engineers shipping LLM features, AI safety is reliability, security, and accountability. A threat model and defenses from a security background.
ai
governance
security
Container Image Scanning Without the Security Theater
· 3 min
Most container scanning setups produce hundreds of unread findings. Scan in CI, rescan the registry, gate admission, and triage by exploitability.
containers
security
ci-cd
OAuth Token Security After the Heroku and Travis CI Breach
· 7 min
Stolen Heroku and Travis CI OAuth tokens exposed private GitHub repos. Short lifetimes, tight scopes, encrypted storage, and monitoring limit the damage.
security
cost
incident-management
Kubernetes Security Hardening: Pods, RBAC, Network, Secrets
· 7 min
Kubernetes defaults favor convenience over security. A layered hardening guide covering pods, RBAC, network policies, secrets, and the control plane.
kubernetes
security
devops
After Log4Shell: Dependency Visibility and Patch Speed
· 5 min
Most teams lost days to Log4j just finding where it ran. What to fix before the next one: SBOMs, owned CI scanning, vendor SLAs, and fast deploys.
security
technical-debt
incident-management
2021 in Review: The Year Everything We Ignored Caught Fire
· 5 min
2021 in review: a job change, cleanup work, Log4j and the us-east-1 outage as inventory tests, OpenTelemetry going real, and what I got wrong.
year-in-review
security
reflection
Log4j CVE-2021-44228 Response: What to Do Right Now
· 5 min
Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228) response playbook: inventory every Java dependency, patch or mitigate exposed services, chase vendors, and keep communicating.
security
engineering
incident-management
Zero Trust Architecture: Identity First, Then Segmentation
· 6 min
Zero trust from cyber-defense exercises and a large telecom: identity first, default-deny segmentation, device posture, and common mistakes.
security
architecture
infrastructure
Remote Work for Engineering Teams: Benefits and Dangers
· 6 min
Years of running distributed engineering teams: what remote work gives you, where it hurts (isolation, blurred boundaries, eroding trust), and what works.
remote-work
leadership
teams
DevSecOps in Practice: The Pipeline Controls I Implement
· 7 min
Pre-commit hooks, CI security stages, OPA Gatekeeper policies, and a triage system: the DevSecOps controls I set up so developers don't route around them.
security
devops
ci-cd
Supply Chain Security After SolarWinds: Where to Start
· 8 min
After SolarWinds: how I map build paths, harden CI, pin and proxy dependencies, sign artifacts, and watch for tampering in enterprise pipelines.
security
ci-cd
SolarWinds Supply-Chain Attack: Lessons for Build Pipelines
· 5 min
The SolarWinds supply-chain compromise is the wake-up call every software team needed. What happened, why it matters, and what you should do right now.
security
incident-management
Container Runtime Security: Seccomp, Network Policy, Falco
· 8 min
Image scanning tells you what's in the box; runtime security tells you what it's doing. How we lock down containers with seccomp, network policy, Falco.
containers
security
kubernetes
Zero Trust vs VPN: How to Migrate Off the Perimeter
· 6 min
VPNs trust the network; zero trust checks every request. Lessons from cyber-defense exercises and my infrastructure startup, plus a six-step migration path off the VPN.
security
infrastructure
VPN Overload in 2020: Why Scaling the VPN Is the Wrong Fix
· 4 min
COVID broke everyone's VPN. More licenses stop the bleeding and split tunneling buys time. The real fix is moving apps behind identity-based access.
infrastructure
security
remote-work
AWS Security While Scaling Fast: Make Secure the Default
· 7 min
Scaling AWS overnight? Manual security review collapses under that pressure. Secure defaults hold: IAM boundaries, private Terraform modules, GuardDuty.
security
cloud
infrastructure
Security Incident Response: Drills Beat Written Plans
· 7 min
Most incident response plans are shelf-ware. What matters in a breach: simple severity levels, the first 30 minutes, four roles, evidence, and drills.
security
incident-management
devops
Kubernetes Security Hardening: Fixing Insecure Defaults
· 5 min
Kubernetes defaults optimize for fast adoption, not safety. A hardening checklist from running production clusters at three startups.
kubernetes
security
infrastructure
Container Security in 2018: PSP, Distroless, Image Signing
· 3 min
Eight months after my first container security post: PodSecurityPolicy, distroless images, image signing, and Vault at a fintech startup.
security
containers
kubernetes
Microservices Security: Identity, mTLS, and Secrets
· 6 min
Split the monolith and every internal call becomes attack surface. Service identity, mTLS, authorization patterns, and secrets management in practice.
security
microservices
architecture
Zero Trust Architecture: Building It at a Fintech Startup
· 5 min
How I replaced castle-and-moat security at a fintech startup with zero trust: identity-first access, an access proxy, and micro-segmentation.
security
architecture
infrastructure
Spectre and Meltdown: What We Patched in the First Five Days
· 4 min
Five days after the Spectre and Meltdown disclosure: what we patched at a fintech startup, what KPTI costs, and what it means for shared infrastructure.
security
infrastructure
Container Security Beyond the Basics: What We Hardened
· 5 min
Containers share the host kernel, so they aren't a security boundary. How we hardened images, runtimes, network policies, and RBAC at a fintech startup.
containers
kubernetes
security
Security Champions: Startup Security Without a Security Team
· 5 min
No budget for a security team? Turn one motivated engineer per team into a security champion. How we run it at an eight-engineer fintech startup.
security
startups
engineering
Security Automation in CI: Stop Reviewing by Hand
· 4 min
Manual security review can't keep up with continuous delivery. How I moved secret scanning, dependency audits, SAST, and DAST into a fintech CI pipeline.
security
devops
ci-cd
WannaCry Postmortem: Unpatched SMB and Flat Networks
· 4 min
WannaCry used an SMB exploit Microsoft patched two months earlier (MS17-010). The failures were patching, segmentation, and exposure, all fixable today.
security
incident-management
GDPR Is an Engineering Problem: A Technical Checklist
· 6 min
GDPR enforcement starts May 2018. The engineering checklist I'm working through at a fintech startup: data inventory, consent, access, deletion, retention.
compliance
privacy
security
Securing APIs: Authentication and Authorization Patterns
· 6 min
How we secured a tiered data API: short-lived RS256 JWTs, OAuth2 scopes mapped to tiers, fail-closed authorization middleware, safe token storage.
security
api
Building a Security-First Engineering Culture
· 5 min
Security culture is habits leadership enforces: no secrets in code, a security question on every PR, least privilege, patch deadlines, and champions.
security
engineering
teams
Security Incident Response Playbook for Startups
· 8 min
An incident response playbook for small teams, learned the hard way: define incidents, name owners, contain carefully, and communicate clearly.
security
incident-management
startups