Welcome to The Hidden Port

Cloud Security, Automation, Best Practices, and Beyond.

5 Critical AWS Security Misconfigurations (2026 Edition) – How to Find & Fix Them

Five AWS misconfigurations still causing breaches in 2026 — includes fixes for public S3 buckets, over-permissive IAM, open security groups, and missing monitoring.

July 7, 2026 · 4 min · 645 words · Javier Pulido

AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore: Full Policy Breakdown

Full breakdown of every permission in the AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore IAM policy, plus a least-privilege custom alternative for production EC2 instances.

July 7, 2026 · 7 min · 1462 words · Javier Pulido

AWS Incident Response: 5 Scenarios & How to Contain Them

Five real-world AWS incident response scenarios with detection signals, containment steps, CLI commands, and automation examples. Practical guide for security teams.

July 7, 2026 · 7 min · 1450 words · Javier Pulido

AWS Security Checklist 2026: 30+ Controls for IAM, EC2 & S3

A step-by-step checklist to secure your AWS account in 2026 — includes IAM hardening, S3 lockdown, logging, and budget alerts. Beginner to intermediate friendly.

July 7, 2026 · 3 min · 540 words · Javier Pulido

EKS Security Best Practices: Hardening Your Cluster

10 actionable EKS security best practices covering IAM integration, RBAC, network policies, pod security, image scanning, secrets management, and node hardening.

July 7, 2026 · 7 min · 1438 words · Javier Pulido

IAM Users Are Dead: Modern AWS Access Control for 2026

Stop using IAM users in AWS. This guide explains why they’re risky and how to migrate to Identity Center, STS, and OIDC-based access — step-by-step.

July 7, 2026 · 3 min · 437 words · Javier Pulido

Meeting CIS Benchmarks for EC2: A Practical Guide

Meeting CIS Benchmarks for EC2: A Practical Guide Introduction The Center for Internet Security (CIS) publishes security benchmarks that are widely recognized as industry best practices. For AWS, these benchmarks ensure your workloads align with a security baseline — making audits easier and reducing risk. In this post, we’ll dive into how the CIS Benchmarks apply to EC2 instances specifically, and how you can meet them in practice. This guide is for: ...

September 25, 2025 · 3 min · 514 words · Javier Pulido

EKS Security: Monitoring, Audit Logs & Runtime Detection

How to monitor EKS for security threats using CloudWatch, GuardDuty, audit logs, and Falco. Covers AWS-native tools, open-source options, and best practices.

September 17, 2025 · 5 min · 964 words · Javier Pulido

eJPTv2: Prep Strategy, Resources & Honest Review

For the past years, most of my focus has been on cloud security — hardening AWS environments, responding to incidents, and making sure access is tightly controlled. But lately, I’ve felt the urge to explore a different side of the equation: ethical hacking. That’s why I’ve decided to take the eJPTv2 (Junior Penetration Tester) certification. This post is a mix of personal motivation, my preparation strategy, and how I see pentesting tying directly back into the work I’ve done in AWS and incident response. ...

September 8, 2025 · 3 min · 539 words · Javier Pulido

What Is IDOR? Finding and Preventing Insecure Direct Object References in AWS APIs

Learn what IDOR is, why it’s so common (and dangerous), see real AWS-related examples, and discover prevention and detection methods for robust API security.

June 27, 2025 · 5 min · 902 words · Javier Pulido