Avatao Blog
Cybersecurity best practices, tips, and the latest news discussed by security professionals. Read on to find the topic that interests you the most!

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Security Champions: Interview with Alexander Antukh, CISO of Glovo
Reading Time: 7 minutes Security champions represent an essential part of any security programs. They lead their teams on security projects, ensure internal security and help keeping security on the top of your mind. But how exactly they operate in a business? We asked Alexander Antukh, Director of Security at Glovo for professional insights.
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Security Champions: Interview with Alexander Antukh, CISO of Glovo
Reading Time: 7 minutes Security champions represent an essential part of any security programs. They lead their teams on security projects, ensure internal security and help keeping security on the top of your mind. But how exactly they operate in a business? We asked Alexander Antukh, Director of Security at Glovo for professional insights.
How to turn your developers into security champions?
Reading Time: 9 minutes Security champions play a vital role in establishing and maintaining a security culture in an engineering organization. See how to turn your developers into security champions!
Why do you need a security champions program?
Reading Time: 6 minutes As the company grows the leadership wants to establish a security program to ensure the solid and undisrupted operation of the business. Security at this point is essential, especially when calculating the loss from a halted business, even for a few hours.
What’s next? – OWASP Top 10 2021
Reading Time: 9 minutes OWASP Top 10 Vulnerabilities in 2021 based on the non-official proposal of Phillippe De Ryck. Here is what we know.
5 best practices to successfully implement training as part of your security program
Reading Time: 6 minutes For most companies, security is considered a side quest, which is partly related to the daily processes. In reality, security ought to be a strong foundation of any organization. To ensure the defense of the enterprise, the relevant teams need strong security knowledge and abilities.
5 Key Challenges When Building a Security Training Program
Reading Time: 6 minutes To build an enterprise security program, one has to go back to the well-known fundamentals of organizational change: People, Process, and Technology (originates from Harold Leavitt’s “Applied Organization Change in Industry”, 1964).
Getting started with Kotlin
Reading Time: 10 minutes If you are working on Java projects you might have heard about other languages that run on the JVM, like Clojure, Kotlin, or Scala. Programmers like to try new things out but is it worth it to pick one of them over Java?
The Tutorial Framework: Containerizing Cybersecurity Knowledge
Reading Time: 9 minutes How can we make security education a whole lot more accessible and fun? The tutorial framework is the answer. In this article we dive into how to create interactive learning environments running inside containers.
Life Before Docker and Beyond – A Brief History of Container Security
Reading Time: 11 minutes Containers have been around for over a decade. Yet before Docker’s explosive success beginning in 2013 they were not wide-spread or well-known. Long gone are the days of chroot, containers are all the rage, and with them, we have a whole new set of development and security challenges.
Why cybersecurity is important for business
Reading Time: 5 minutes Cybersecurity is an inherently negative asset. As with any protective measure, the major challenge is to measure the value (or Return on Investment, ROI) of cybersecurity. It is significantly more difficult to make this value apparent to stakeholders: customers, users and decision-makers in the company.
Make your company better, invest in security training for developers
Reading Time: 7 minutes What are the key benefits of practical security training for developers? Here are some tips on how you can build a case for a developer security program.
Back to school – Cybersecurity is missing from college campuses
Reading Time: 5 minutes Not a single day goes by without a devastating security breach affecting someone, somewhere. In the first six months of 2019 alone, over 4 billion records around the globe have been exposed due to easily preventable data leaks.
XSS Case Study
Reading Time: 6 minutes Explore the key elements of this Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability in the Google search engine.
A quantitative approach to Data Protection Impact Assessment
Reading Time: 7 minutes Ever-increasing amounts of information are produced, stored, processed, and transferred enabling products and services across all industries. A substantial amount of this information relates to an identified or identifiable natural person i.e., its personal data. The processing of personal data can, unfortunately, also summon risks to individuals’ rights and freedoms, sometimes materializing in real harm.
DNS security and privacy issues and how to avoid them
Reading Time: 7 minutes Even if you use HTTPS, your browsing habits can still be tracked by observing your DNS queries. Besides the lack of confidentiality, plain old DNS doesn’t provide data integrity and authenticity either. This article discusses DNS security and privacy and points out the problems that can arise from lacking in these attributes and gives some tips on how to remedy them.
API vulnerability: Wild card to win USPS customer data
Reading Time: 3 minutes The US Postal Service launched its Informed Visibility program last year to provide better insight into their mailstream service. For example, one can obtain near real-time notifications about delivery dates and identify trends. However, they have made much more data available than intended, at least 60 million customers were exposed to anyone who is registered on http://www.usps.com.
An overview of Linux container security
Reading Time: 5 minutes Containers are often treated as if they were virtual machines which are far from the truth, they are a lot less isolated from the host system. However, there is a myriad of ways to enhance isolation. This blog post will give you an overview of Linux container security.
Not so smart pointers
Reading Time: 5 minutes Even though modern C++ ( the standard since C++11) has made programming in this language much more secure, it also introduced new vulnerabilities hidden under its layers of abstractions. In C and older versions of C++, the concept of pointers wasn’t easy to grasp for beginners. You had to worry about null dereference, dangling pointers, deallocation, etc. However, the Middle Ages are over, we have smart pointers now.
Security and usability: How to find a good balance
Reading Time: 8 minutes How would you like the idea of being escorted by armed security staff from the grocery store to your home in order to protect the valuable air fresheners you have just bought? Would you be confused, would you visit the store again?
How I could have stolen your photos from Google – my first 3 bug bounty writeups
Reading Time: 8 minutes IT security is a really huge topic and until you find your first bug you can’t be sure that you have the required amount of knowledge, luck, and patience. Joining the club of bug bounty hunters as a newbie is hard, so let me share my story with you.
Smart Contract Security
Reading Time: 6 minutes Blockchain-based platforms are becoming increasingly popular due to their ability to maintain a public distributed ledger, providing reliability, integrity, and auditability for transactions without a trusted entity.
Secure collaborative infrastructure deployment workflow with Terraform, Vault, and Atlantis
Kristóf Havasi (DevOps Engineer)In one of our recent posts, we wrote about the difficulties of adopting infrastructure automation in a previously static environment. As experience shows, it’s never...
Secure development with Spring Boot
Reading Time: 10 minutes In the past decade, Spring Framework became a well established and prominent web framework for developing Java applications. The most exciting and essential changes in the Spring ecosystem was the birth and progression of Spring Boot. No matter what you need, Spring Boot provides comprehensive, easy-to-use, and interdisciplinary development environment tools for deployment and assists in the whole development lifecycle.
The three fatal bugs behind the Facebook breach
Reading Time: 5 minutes The Facebook breach was discovered after the social media company saw an unusual spike of user activity that began on September 14, 2018. A few days later, on Tuesday, September 25, Facebook’s engineering team discovered an unprecedented security issue, that affected about 30 million users. The social media giant says the flaw has been patched, but the people behind this attack are still unknown.
How to automate your infrastructure with Ansible in a secure way?
Dávid Osztertág (Software Engineer, Avatao)In this article, we will cover how to use Ansible for infrastructure automation. Here at Avatao, we are big believers in infrastructure-as-code which is a...
How to dive into web-security as a developer
Great developers possess a wide variety of skills, from technological expertise to product thinking. You need some of these for your current job, others you just picked up over the years....
Semancat versioning
Tackling the versioning pains of a greenfield project with cats. New projects can force us, developers to face certain challenges that we won’t even have to think about when working on an already...
Security issues to be aware of before moving to the cloud
As more and more infrastructures are moved to the cloud datacenters, services offered by the cloud providers became an obvious target for exploitation and cloud security in practice is more...
Git security best practices
In this article we will discuss different methods to avoid common pitfalls in terms of Git security. We live in a world where it is hard not to know Git, the most popular Distributed Version Control...
Using cloud-services, security is your job too
Being cloud native won’t save you from external threats if you as a user are not aware of basic security needs – cloud providers simply cannot do everything for you while due to the heavy demand to...
Report a vulnerability in a responsible way!
If you have found a vulnerability and you want to act responsibly, discretion is most important. Always remember you have information that can be exploited by black-hats putting not only the...
Broken Access Control
In this article we cover examples of broken access control, how to find it in your application and possible consequences. Access control, or authorization, is how a web application grants access to...
Learn about CSP-based XSS protection
The security model of web is rooted in the same-origin policy. Each origin is isolated from the rest of the web and codes should only have access to their origin’s data. Because of this model,...
Is your company ready for a responsible disclosure policy program?
A company has to be mature enough to implement a responsible disclosure policy – or at least mature enough to implement its own tailor-made program. Implementing a responsible disclosure...
Make AWS infrastructure more secure with the help of IAM
The trend to move to the cloud seems to be unstoppable that raises more and more security concerns. AWS can be considered the leader in the market of cloud service providers. It offers more than a...
Insource instead of outsourcing your cybersecurity operations
As the enterprise architecture becomes more and more complex, the task of the Chief Security Information Officer (CISO) becomes overwhelming. CISOs have a tough time to find talented cybersecurity...
Deep dive into the Equifax breach and the Apache Struts vulnerability
You’ve probably read about the Equifax breach and the Apache Struts vulnerability in NY Times, in Bloomberg or somewhere else. The breach resulted in the leakage of 143 million user profiles,...
Learn to build secure software
We are writing millions of lines of code day by day, but only a few of us take security into account. We exactly know that it’s really easy to put security aside as it takes more investment than...
How !SpamAndHex became a top hacker team in the world. The final part.
This is the final part of this blog series. If you haven’t done already so, you can read the first and second part of our story also. It was early 2013, in the middle of my PhD studies when two...
Interview with Tamás “KT” Koczka from !SpamAndHex
We are more than happy to welcome Tamás Koczka (aka “KT”) who is one of the key members of the CrySyS Student Core so that of the !SpamAndHex team also. As the captain of !SpamAndHex and the main...
Three major XSS issues in 2016 (plus an avatao XMaSS challenge)
In our previous blog, we gave you a small introduction to Cross-site Scripting (XSS) attacks and added some easy challenges to get a taste of web security. It seems, however, that XSS is still one...
Parse your binaries with Kaitai WebIDE
Binary analysis starts with the understanding of different file formats. Fortunately, there are several tools (e.g., CFF explorer, FileAlyzer) which help you to understand their internal structure,...
Interview with Chris Wysopal, CTO of Veracode
We are more than happy to welcome Chris Wysopal, (also on Twitter) as the next security expert on our blog. Chris, the CTO of Veracode, is one of the key influencers in IT security today. He is a...
Interview with Zoltán Balázs, security expert
We are more than happy to welcome Zoltán Balázs, (also on Twitter) as the next security expert on our blog. Zoli has long track records in bypassing security defense products. He regularly gives...
avataoTools introduces popular security tools
One of the most difficult parts in IT security is to get started. There are zillions of interesting topics all around, but if you are completely new in this area you can easily get lost....
Interview with Charlie Miller, security researcher
Charlie Miller, (also on Twitter) is well-known in the security community for his exceptional hacking results. He won the Pwn2Own contest at CanSecWest 4 times by exploiting various Apple products...
How !SpamAndHex became a top hacker team (part 2)
This is the second part of our !SpamAndHex series. You can read the first part here. Everything starts with a vision. It was in 2009 at the very beginning of my master studies at the Budapest...
Interview with Mateusz “j00ru” Jurczyk, security expert
We are more than happy to welcome Mateusz Jurczyk (aka “j00ru”), (also on Twitter) as the second security expert on our blog. When talking about low-level Windows kernel security, we are unable to...
Reverse engineering tutorial and challenge
So here we are again with your next avatao Tuesday challenge. Today, we are delving a bit into reverse engineering by providing a small tutorial and a challenge to solve. A decent definition for...
Interview with Gabor Molnar, security expert, who co-discovered Rosetta Flash
In this new series we talk to security experts on how they started their journey in this exciting field. The first is Gabor Molnar (aka “mg”), (also on Twitter) who independently co-discovered the...
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