Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Before I joined the security industry, I was an end user. Coming in with that first-hand experience equips me to talk about secure remote access from multiple perspectives: as a vendor and as a practitioner. This lets me see the technologies available and also understand the drivers and issues engineering orgs face adopting them, particularly with onboarding engineers. I’ve been a support engineer for over 20 years, across Operations and System & Database Administration.

At Teleport we do IT a little differently — supporting a global remote company in hypergrowth is no easy feat and the playbook is different from traditional IT work. In this article, we want to share some of our IT philosophies that enable our employees to keep their agility despite working very asynchronously around the world.

Although the typical use case of SSH is to access a remote server securely, you can also transfer files, forward local and remote ports, mount remote directories, redirect GUI, or even proxy arbitrary traffic (need I say SSH is awesome?). And this is just a small set of what’s possible with SSH.

This is the age-old question faced by so many tech teams: do we build or buy a system we need? TL:DR, Buying can save your engineer time for building the core stack and for the fun experiments needed to determine when to shake up the core stack.

A multi-protocol access proxy is a powerful concept for securing access to infrastructure. But accessing numerous computing resources distributed across the globe via a single endpoint presents a latency challenge. Today we are announcing that the hosted edition of Teleport Access Plane is now available in 5 regions all over the world.

Those of us that work with technology get this question a lot: “What do you do?” “I work in technology — more specifically, I work as a pre-sales engineer.” Sound familiar? Working in IT can mean a lot of different things, and to those outside of this world, it quickly becomes deeply technical and complicated to explain to non-IT people. Even explaining what you do to IT people can become complicated.

There is a growing discussion among network engineers, DevOps teams, and security professionals about the security benefits of bastions. Many assume that they are the “old way” of network access and have little relevance in the modern cloud native stack. These speculations are not irrelevant as in recent years, the corporate IT network perimeter as we knew it is diminishing, and the concept has been shifted to data, identity, and compute perimeter.

In April 2021, I discovered an attack vector that could allow a malicious Pull Request to a Github repository to gain access to our production environment. Open source companies like us, or anyone else who accepts external contributions, are especially vulnerable to this. For the eager, the attack works by pivoting from a Kubernetes worker pod to the node itself, and from there exfiltrating credentials from the CI/CD system.

What would you do when a security incident is detected? Shut down the servers? Pull out the power cord from the data center? When an incident is detected, both the incident method and the time required to contain an incident are essential to limit the damage. The slower you are to react, the more damage an incident would incur. And a service downtime to contain an incident can cost businesses even more than a security incident itself.

Do you have what it takes to become a cybersecurity expert? We interviewed 3 security professionals to find out how they got their start and what advice they would give to someone starting their career in cybersecurity. With security threats increasing, much of business continuity has come to rely on data security. In particular, engineering teams building cloud software rely on access to an ever-growing number of computing resources.