You never forget your first screw-up in cloud security. Mine happened at 2:37 AM on Thursday when I got a Slack ping that our backend was down… and our AWS bill had, for some unexplained reason, tripled.
Spoiler alert: it was us. Not a hacker. Not a fancy zero-day. Just a S3 bucket with the default settings, and an EC2 instance with a public IP and open ports. That night sent me diving down the proverbial rabbit hole of cloud security hygiene, and I have never looked at infrastructure the same since.
Here is what I learned, the hard way (so you may not have to):
1. Identity Is the Hidden Monster
Everyone talks about IAM like it is easy. It is not. It is fragile. It is dangerous. And it is always someone else’s problem – until your entire dev environment gets wiped because the dev-admin had a wildcard permission.
I used to think: “Just give devs some admin rights – it is faster.” Now I think: “Who the hell created this IAM role, and why can it launch anything in any region?” If you are not auditing roles monthly and practicing the principle of least privilege, you are playing cloud roulette. You may not lose this week, but you will.
2. Infrastructure as Code Is Awesome—Until You Accidentally Open the World
I am a huge fan of Terraform. I am also a huge fan of Pulumi. What I do not like is how one small typo in a CIDR block (looking at you, 0.0.0.0/0…) can cast your entire stack to the internet. I once deployed a brand-new stack and forgot to enable encryption on RDS. That database ran unencrypted for 3 hours before we noticed, and it accepted 19 connection attempts from random IPs in that time.
Lesson learned: if you’re writing IaC and not running it through Checkov, TFSec, or kics, you are only automating your mistakes faster.
We had GuardDuty, CloudTrail, all the bells and whistles. But no one was looking at the alerts. Why? Because we did not tune them. It was like being in a server room with 40 fire alarms going off…and just getting used to it. When we got serious about security, we started sending high priority alerts to Slack.
We made a “Red Channel”. Just urgent alerts. Just items that are actionable. This is when security stopped being noise, and started becoming a culture.
4. The Real Fix Is Owning It Early
“DevSecOps” is a marketing buzzword to the uninitiated until your team discovers they are responsible for the security debt of everything they ship. We added security scans to our CI/CD process. We turned on pre-commits to fetch secrets. We made incident response playbooks.
None of it happened overnight, but the shift changed everything. Developers stopped thinking about security as: “that is for someone else.” They started seeing security as a component of their craft.
Closing Thought: Paranoia Is A Feature, Not A Bug
The cloud is amazing. It’s fast. It’s scalable. It’s powerful. But it also doesn’t do empathy. With one misplaced configuration, it is all over, and you end up in the news. I learned the hard way that there is no second chance to build cloud infrastructure securely. You either build it well, or you rebuild it after a breach. Be paranoid. Be loud. Be the person asking, “Wait, is it secure?” Even when it annoys people. One day it won’t be a drill.
