Tag Archives: Amazon

Starting/stopping Amazon EC2 instances using CLI and Python SDK

It’s a very good practice to scan your perimeter from the outside of your network, simulating an attacker. However, you will need to deploy the scanners somewhere to do this. Hosting on Amazon EC2 can be a good and cost-effective option, especially if you start instances with vulnerability scanners only when it’s necessary and keep them stopped at other time.

Amazon AWS python

So, in this post I will give some examples of how to manage Amazon instances automatically using the AWS CLI or Python SDK (boto3): start/stop the instance and get public ip address.

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Not for Russians

Let’s talk about web-site blocking. Not about cases of government censorship, not about cases where content is blocked for copyright reasons and not even about sanctions. I want to pay attention to the cases when companies block access to their own sites voluntarily for user from the whole country, in particular for the users from Russia.

I do not know why they actually do such things. Perhaps they are trying to defend themselves against evil Russian hackers. Not the most effective measure. Attackers know how to use proxies and VPNs. Maybe they are under constant DDoS attack from Russian IPs? But these problems can also be solved more effectively without blocking an entire country. And this can be understood for the company, which is not much in Information Security, but I see this regularly on the websites of Security Vendors. For example, Tanium:

Tanium

Or a very recent purchase of Qualys, start-up Nevis Networks:

Nevis Networks

But okay, in these cases, only sales of these companies in Russia suffer (if they even exist).

A slightly different case was recently seen on the Amazon recruiting site.

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