Accessing an AWS EC2 Instance via Macfusion

April 19, 2016 | 2 comments

As part of a drive to improve security we are moving more of our AWS EC2 development instances behind a VPN. This is fine for most things but the code editor we use, ShiftEdit, won’t see the servers behind the VPN as they are not publicly assessable over SSH. This means I was looking for a different solution. Ideally I wanted a code editor that had native SSH support using private keys or agent forwarding and had a tabbed interface. Unfortunately none of major players seemed to have what I was looking for.

There are a number of free editors … Read the rest

Installing ModSecurity & OWASP Core Rule Set on an Amazon EC2 Linux (CentOS) Instance

Installing ModSecurity & OWASP Core Rule Set on an Amazon EC2 Linux (CentOS) Instance

December 29, 2015 | Comment

NOTE: This post has been updated to include the requirement of mod_unique_id.

As part of some investigations at work I have been playing around with ModSecurity, the open source web application firewall (WAF), and the standard set of rules provided by OWASP. All our infrastructure is hosted with Amazon AWS so I thought that it would be useful to drop down the steps I took to get this working on a bare bones Amazon Linux box.

Install ModSecurity

You can, of course, compile ModSecurity from the sources but it is easier to install via yum, however, it is part … Read the rest