Welcome to The Hidden Port

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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: ...

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

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. ...

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.