#ssm | (1)

Connect to your EC2 instance using SSH the modern way

Did you know that establishing an SSH connection with an EC2 instance is possible without configuring a key pair and allowing inbound traffic on port 22? How is that possible? The secret is a combination of EC2 Instance Connect and Systems Manager (SSM)...

EC2 Checklist: 7 things to do after launching an instance

Launching an EC2 instance takes minutes. Keeping your virtual machines secure and maintaining your VMs is more work. In this blog post, I share seven things to do after launching a Linux, Windows, or macOS instance: Configure remote access with SSM Ses...

Managing application secrets: SSM Parameter Store vs. Secrets Manager

Many applications interact with external or internal systems like databases or REST APIs. When your application talks to another system, it usually authenticates with a secret, e.g., an API key, username + password, or a certificate. This leads to the q...

EC2 Instances 2.0 - Time to Update Your Toolbox

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) has more than 13 years of public history and is one of the oldest AWS services. EC2 is a mature service that reinvented itself many times: From EC2 classic to Amazon VPC. From SSH access to AWS SSM Session Manager. Fr...

AWS SSM is a trojan horse: fix it now!

Recently, I held a security workshop together with a team of engineers. At some point, the team demonstrated how they use AWS Systems Manager (SSM) to run commands on a machine. What the team didn’t know: they enabled a backdoor that allows everyone wit...