Devops on Mazin Ahmed

DoS Attacks are Dead: Demystifying Practical DoS Attacks

Sun, 04 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I recently spoke at BlackHat MEA 2022, the largest security conference in the Middle East and Africa region. My talk, titled “Demystifying Practical DoS Attacks”, focused on the increasing threat of DoS attacks and the need for improved defense solutions and for practical validation of current DDoS prevention solutions.

In my presentation, I shared my research on practical DoS attacks, including recent Application-Level DoS attacks and evasion techniques. I also discussed the discovery of unique DoS vectors in modern APIs and demonstrated how to simulate the most significant Layer 7 DDoS attack that Google Cloud experienced in August 2022.

Scan Terraform plans and changes with tfquery, an SQL-powered framework

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

New Release: tfquery now supports SQL queries for Terraform Plan Scanning

In case you’re an infrastructure security engineer and have not tried tfquery yet, this will be a great blog post for you.

Tfquery is a framework that allows running SQL queries on Terraform code. It’s made to analyze your Terraform infrastructure, locate resources, run security compliance checks, spot misconfigured resources, develop CI benchmarks, and much more.

Twitch Internal Security Tools: In-depth Analysis of the Leaked Twitch Security Tools

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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How was Twitch hacked? What security controls did Twitch build?

The Twitch breach revealed more than 120 internal security tools developed by the Twitch Security team.

I analyzed all the leaked security tools that were developed by Twitch Security. Check out the full research.

Background #

Twitch is an interactive live-streaming service for content, gaming, entertainment, sports, and music. In 2015, Amazon acquired Twitch for $970 million, and after COVID-19 time, its market value skyrocketed as more people adapted to live-streaming from home.

Attacking Modern Environments Series: Attack Vectors on Terraform Environments

Sat, 29 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I have given a talk about my latest research, “Attack Vectors on Terraform Environments”.

About the talk #

Have you ever encountered an environment in an engagement that uses Terraform for IaC (infrastructure-as-code) management? Almost every modern company does now.

In this talk, I will share techniques and attack vectors to exploit and compromise Terraform environments in engagements, along with patterns I have seen that achieve successful infrastructure takeover against companies. I will also cover detection and prevention methods for each attack vector discussed in my talk.

Interview With the AppSec Podcast: Terraform Security

Sun, 17 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I interviewed with the AppSec Podcast to talk about IaC and Terraform. We discussed Terraform, why IaC is important to your organization, the technical risks introduced when running Terraform in your environment, and a few discussions related to my DEFCON talk about Attack Vectors on Terraform Environments.

Listen to the Podcast #

Watch on YouTube #

Listen on Spotify #

Listen on Apple Podcast #

tfquery: Run SQL queries on your Terraform infrastructure

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Have you ever tried analyzing a Terraform environment with thousands of cloud resources for security and DevOps? It used to be hard, until now!

I’m open-sourcing my newest project, tfquery: a framework that allows running SQL queries on Terraform code. It saved me dozens of hours in analysis.

tfquery helps answer questions that are hard to answer about your infrastructure-as-code. It allows querying resources and analyzing their configuration using a SQL-powered framework.