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HackerRank is an excellent website to create code based on prompt challenges, prepare for coding interviews, search for jobs, and to see how the community has approached the solutions over time. The author wanted to dive into the Python focused solutions, and is in no way affiliated with HackerRank itself. The Challenge: Mean, Median, Mode From 10 Days of Statistics Day 0: Mean, Median, and Mode: Output Format Print lines of output in the following order:...

Recently, I became interested in what code repositories were automatically generated from the AWS CloudFormation Resource Specification files. These act as schema in how CloudFormation templates must be built. Tools that came to mind as already likely doing so were the ones meant to help with CFN template development by abstracting it away from raw JSON/YAML and into a particular language like SparkleFormation, Troposphere, and probably the AWS Cloud Development Kit....

UPDATE 2019-11-18: Added some additional notes to include mention of AWS Config, Zelkova, and some info about tools by Rhino Security Labs like Pacu (thanks to input by @andrewbrown!) Again and Again Companies continue to make the news. Two, in particular, led to this post. One was a dating app, where private photos were publicly available for a year. 1 They’re being fined $240,000. The second company? An IT firm:...

Premise: Death and birth certificates can be filed online, with practically no oversight. DefCon Response: Let’s show the world how easy it is to kill anyone, and/or profit from the birthing/killing of virtual…babies? This is one of my DefCon 23 Debriefs, from the blog archives back in 2015! If you ever have the opportunity to get your work to ship you to Defcon, take it. If you ever get the opportunity to ship yourself, don’t think: just go....

Premise: Let’s place a computer on a gun, and give it WiFi. DefCon Response: Let’s hijack it, and install our own malicious updates. This is one of my DefCon 23 Debriefs, from the blog archives back in 2015! If you ever have the opportunity to get your work to ship you to Defcon, take it. If you ever get the opportunity to ship yourself, don’t think: just go. Another DefCon 23 debrief from 2015:...