After working remote for 2 years, My team and I were looking forward to meeting in person for Nullcon 2022. The excitement was through the roof.

We all travelled from our respective places to reach Goa. While travelling on the train, I had the privilege of enjoying the coastal route to Goa.

After reaching Goa, the first thing I did was to enjoy a scrumptious Fish Thali.

After settling at the hotel , I decided go say hi to Riyaz and Rohit who were running a 3 day training at Nullcon on Breaking and Pwning Apps and Servers on AWS and Google Cloud — Post Pandemic Edition

The attendees had a lot of learning and were enjoying the training which helped them understand attack approaches and how to create attack arsenal in the cloud, various scenarios were taken from vulnerability assessment, penetration testing, and OSINT engagements which took the attendees through the journey of discovery, identification, and exploitation of security weaknesses, misconfiguration, and poor programming practices that can lead to complete compromise of the cloud infrastructure.

After the training was over the team met up for dinner and it was so lovely to see everyone in person.

The conference day arrived and everyone was excited to attend the keynote talk by Dr.-Ing. Mario Heiderich .

After the keynote, everyone spilt up to attend various talks from different tracks.

I went on to attending a few talks from the bug bounty track, CXO track, checked different booths and said hi to the winja organisers.

It was quite jam-packed and crowded at the venue. Of course, we were all meeting in person after 2 long years!!

Met a few friends from the community who also were guests on my podcast

After a busy day 1 at the conference, the day ended with networking party of the conference, team dinner and a night of Dumb Charades and loads of laughter!!

After a long day 1, we were all set for talks from day 2 .

We had Riyaz Walikar at the Resume clinic helping out folks with their resumes and providing career advice.

Day 2 ended with me and my team spending some time together, meeting a few of the industry’s best and closing ceremony of the conference.

I am glad to have had the opportunity to meet the industry’s best and was also introduced to new industry folks by my circle of friends at the conference.

I believe conferences are a great place to learn, meet new people, network and also a great time to bond with your team in a post pandemic world. It was amazing meeting everyone and to go back with so many memories and knowing that I know my team a little better now :)

Until next time! :)

Appsecco at Nullcon 2022 : Winning Friends, Meeting teams, Pwning Apps was originally published in Appsecco on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is something I have been meaning to write about for a while now and was recently posted on an Instagram page as a write-up. I received overwhelming response from so many who were able to relate to this.For the benefit of the masses I decided to post this on my blog.

I dedicate this to everyone who has dealt with this or is dealing with this at the moment.

Before I get into the details of the process, I have to say this I’m not against arranged marriage as a choice because I have read stories and seen people who have found love through it or are at least happy about that choice and I think that’s beautiful.

But what really concerns me is the perception around the process and how it is dealt with on a day-to-day basis which eventually causes the individual and the family members the burnout.

There is so much stereotype attached to it for both genders.5–6 years ago, the expectations from women were to be married by 22,23 years and 26,27 years for the men but times are changing, and people are choosing their own timelines.

I remember how extended family, neighbours, uncles & aunties I knew started being concerned that I turned 25 & yet hadn’t found anyone to marry. Every wedding or gathering you go to, suddenly all eyes on you and what you have been up to in your life?

It didn’t matter if you had a thriving career, or you were doing well for yourself because that doesn’t count as being settled and you aren’t really settled until you’re married. 😛

I would like to share a few instances I personally experienced and how it caused a burnout.

I would hear people constantly telling me random sexist stuff. I’m going to list out a few things that really got to me.

“You know what, you have everything, but you need to lose some weight to find good matches. Just the way you have expectations from the potential groom, the groom would expect a beautiful wife too.”

This specific thing affected me to an extent that I almost believed it and hated myself for being fat and thought being slim would make me feel beautiful. Thankfully, I realised very soon that’s not true.

“You cannot reject the guy first because it’s always the guy who decides first if he wants to proceed or not”.

My understanding is it is either mutual liking or mutual disliking for both sides.

I also remember being told to have “sanskari” DPs on social media accounts because potential grooms and their family will visit your accounts to learn about you.

I have been called as a picky person with too many expectations because I barely liked anyone I met through this process. I recently entered the 30 club and the latest one I hear is you are running out of choices and have limited options. Try not to be picky.

The arranged marriage meet-ups are the most stressful and funniest when you have stories to laugh at later.

I had to meet a few before the pandemic hit the world. Now looking back, they are just some funny stories. It is tricky to decide in the 1st meeting if you want to take things forward with anyone. Specially when the conversations revolve around being asked if you know how to cook? or when the potential groom doesn’t have clarity on what he is looking for in a partner or if you end-up finding yourself in a rapid-fire interview.

When nothing in the process works out it is very natural to feel the burnout because there are so many expectations and apprehensions. I remember the time when my parents were pretty worked up & wondering that since nothing was working out, I must have been talking about something that must be scaring the potential grooms.

After being in this process for a while now and watching people around me in similar situations has made me realise that the unmarried ones are constantly reminded about not having found the ‘one’, as though that’s the only life purpose and getting married will fix everything. This mentality has been carried on and ingrained in us for generations together hence we are conditioned to think that way.

I have experienced this and seen this in my circle that the process really takes a toll on people mentally leading to burnout/exhaustion because of the hype associated with being married and settling down.

As corny as this sounds, I am of the belief that the connections are meant to be, and you hit off with someone who you chose to take that leap of faith with.

My understanding of marriages from experienced people around me is that, in marriages there are going to be compromises for both partners and you just have to find someone who you can relate to and are okay making those compromises for each other. Hence it is not something you can rush into.

If you have made it so far thank you for reading. I wanted to share my thoughts on the process and a little bit about my experiences. If you are dealing with something similar be glad to know that you are not alone and hope you found some strength after reading this. If you are from a different generation or you don’t agree with write-up. That’s okay. Let’s agree to disagree! 🙂

Appsecco is excited to be supporting the 5th Anniversary Celebration for All Day DevOps on Nov 12th, 2020.

We at Appsecco are organising a private virtual viewing party during IST hours and below is the playlist of talks we are planning on attending during the viewing party.

Selected List of Talks we plan to watch and discuss

SRE — Provisioning and Remediation Zen in scaling Facebook Infrastructure — Nov 12, 03:00 PM- https://www.alldaydevops.com/addo-speakers/catherine-sweeney

DevSecOps — Our Secret Management Journey from Code to Vault — Nov 12, 02:30 PM — https://www.alldaydevops.com/addo-speakers/jeroen-willemsen

DevSecOps — Embedding Security in your Terraform and Cloudformation Code — Nov 12, 03:30 PM — https://www.alldaydevops.com/addo-speakers/barak-schoster

CI/CD Continuous Everything — Pipeline your Pipelines (Automate your Automation)! — Nov 12, 3.30 PM — https://www.alldaydevops.com/addo-speakers/giulio-vian

Modern Infrastructure — Ruling Kubernetes on All Cloud Platforms — Nov 12, 03:30 PM — https://www.alldaydevops.com/addo-speakers/h%C3%BCseyin-babal

DevSecOps— Securing Serverless Applications using Azure — Nov 12, 04:00 PM — https://www.alldaydevops.com/addo-speakers/shodipo-ayomide

DevSecOps— Defender’s Guide to Cloud Native Infrastructure Security — Nov 12, 04:30 PM — https://www.alldaydevops.com/addo-speakers/madhu-akula

SRE — Site Reliability Engineering: Anti-patterns in Everyday Life and What They Teach Us — Nov 12, 04:30 PM — https://www.alldaydevops.com/addo-speakers/jennifer-petoff

Cultural Transformation — Embrace the Pitfalls (Our Stop-Start Journey to Change) — Nov 12, 04:30 PM — https://www.alldaydevops.com/addo-speakers/stacy-cashmore

DevSecOps— From Dev to DevSec: How Developers are the new Security RockStars — Nov 12, 05:00 PM — https://www.alldaydevops.com/addo-speakers/stefania-chaplin

Modern Infrastructure -The Past, Present, and Future of Cloud-Native API Gateways — Nov 12, 05:30 PM — https://www.alldaydevops.com/addo-speakers/daniel-bryant

CI/CD Continuous Everything — Security Phoenix, From the Ashes of DevOps, From the Ashes of DevOps a New Security Creature is Born — Nov 12, 05:30 PM — https://www.alldaydevops.com/addo-speakers/francesco-cipollone

SRE — How We Scaled Google Meet during COVID19 — Nov 12, 05:30 PM — https://www.alldaydevops.com/addo-speakers/samantha-schaevitz

SRE — Driving Digital Transformation Through CloudOps and Site Reliability Engineering — Nov 12, 07:30 PM — https://www.alldaydevops.com/addo-speakers/deepak-ramchandani

DevSecOps — Serverless Auth and Secrets Management — Nov 12, 07:30 PM — https://www.alldaydevops.com/addo-speakers/andres-grimm

DevSecOps — CI/CD Pipelines for DevSecOps with Hybrid Cloud — Nov 13, 06:00 AM — https://www.alldaydevops.com/addo-speakers/michael-fraser

Cultural Transformation — Collective Mindfulness for Better Decisions in the Midst of Uncertainty — Nov 13, 08:00 AM — https://www.alldaydevops.com/addo-speakers/kurt-andersen

SRE — Multicluster + Microservice = Distributed Services — Nov 13, 10:00 AM — https://www.alldaydevops.com/addo-speakers/steve-mcghee

Modern Infrastructure — k3s,k3d, k9s, k8s — What are all the Numbers About? — Nov 13, 11:30 AM — https://www.alldaydevops.com/addo-speakers/saloni-narang

CI/CD Continuous Everything — CICD in the World of Serverless — Nov 13, 11:30 AM — https://www.alldaydevops.com/addo-speakers/srushith-r

Hire Appsecco to pentest your AWS based Applications

At Appsecco we provide advice, testing and training around software, infra, web and mobile apps, especially that are cloud hosted. We also specialise in auditing AWS environments as per the AWS CIS Foundations Benchmark to create a picture of the current state of security in your AWS environment. Our experience has led us to creating multiple hands on training courses like the very popular “Breaking and Pwning Apps and Servers on AWS and Azure” and “Automated Defence using Cloud Services for AWS, Azure and GCP”.

Drop us an email, contact@appsecco.com if you would like us to assess the security of your AWS infrastructure or if you would like your security team trained in advanced pentesting techniques against AWS.

Appsecco hosting a private AllDayDevOps 2020 Virtual Viewing Party was originally published in Appsecco on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I am personally happy that I have come a long way from where I started to what I am doing today.

The definition of success is different for each one of us and for me it is to find peace and happiness at what you do and having an impact on people you work with.

On that note, I would like to share my journey of finding the role I enjoy.

It all started during my 1st internship where I then joined as a full-time employee. My 1st project was to build a Web Vulnerability scanner. Honestly at that point I had no idea, what that was and later at some point in my life I would be hearing about it regularly. So that was my first encounter with infosec.

The 1st job is usually a special one for most of us. I made some amazing friends for life. During my corporate training I was lucky to get introduced to security, my well-wisher & then mentor introduced me to null community.

I started out as a developer eventually wanting to move into a security role. Hence, I decided to start going to null meets. After attending one of the monthly null meets, I was convinced that this would be a great place to learn and network. I did get started with appsec and made some amazing friends from the community.

Apoorva & I did our first women’s only workshop at c0c0n 2014 and then under the guidance of Akash, Infosecgirls was started. Back in those days it was hard to find women attending security meets. Hence the idea was to have a platform for women to get comfortable and confident to be able to present at larger platforms.

I consider myself as an ambivert. Since the extrovert in me loves talking to people and getting to know their perspectives and stories, speaking at various infosecgirls events helped me realise my long-lost love for teaching and how much I enjoyed meeting new people.

With the help of community friends and contacts, I got my 2nd job but my first appsec role and was thrilled about it. I did learn about security and enjoyed testing but did feel something was missing. I couldn’t figure out what that was immediately but when I worked on a project where I had to manage the project and do day-to-day assessments, I thoroughly enjoyed working on it. That is when I came to realisation of how much I enjoyed managing projects, building processes and being in client facing roles. I decided to take up the role full time and moved on to the role of Project Manager.

When I started that role, I was learning processes, basics of project management, working with internal stakeholders most of the time and few external stakeholders. It started with managing smaller accounts then gradually went onto handling big sized accounts and I also learnt about dealing with difficult clients and cherishing the happy clients.

The favourite part of my job was solving challenges to resolve blockers for the project and finding effective ways for the smooth execution of the project. I loved going to work and doing my favourite thing. Having a supportive manager who was approving of my ideas to be implemented was the icing on the cake.

After being in the role for a while I moved into my comfort zone of doing routine work and was bored. I wanted to learn more about being in a client facing role and how the whole sales process works before winning projects which led to my current job.

In the last 8 months, I have learnt so much about business, sales processes, people psychology, customer value and lot more about being the first point of contact for a client.

I am also learning about how business and sales works during these tough times of Covid-19. It has been an exhilarating process.

So that has been my journey of finding the role I enjoy. I learned that the most important thing is to figure out what really excites you and helps you stay motivated, then try finding a role or job you enjoy doing that it doesn’t feel like work.

It has a been an interesting 1 month at Appsecco and I want to share my experience of the whole process of deciding to move here and the 1st month of work.

Pre-joining story

I was in this phase of life of being in my comfort zone for a while and that’s when it stuck to me that I can’t let this go on for too long and need to do something about it. So, I decided to reach out to my community friends if they were aware of any job openings in their organization or any other organization for “security project manager” role. I didn’t hear back from anyone for at least couple of months and wasn’t worried as I was hopeful of finding an interesting job soon and then one fine Monday, Akash reached out to me asking if I would be interested to work at Appsecco for the Security project manager role. I was on cloud nine and honestly didn’t know how to react to that. Like me and working at Appsecco with the dream team. Even in my wildest dreams, I never imagined this to happen to me. It took a while to process this was really happening to me. I was way too excited. So yeah folks, Life has its ways of surprising you!

Throwback to community days

I have known Akash from Null community and worked with him closely while starting infosecgirls initiative alongside Apoorva and he has been my mentor too. I have learnt so much from him and since then, I have been a big fan of his ideologies and his working ways. So, the excitement of Appsecco job offer was obvious right?

Back to pre-joining story

We decided to meet the next day for formal discussion on the job role. Akash walked me through the job description, what is expected out of me and provided me a high-level description of growing in this career path. I was clearly excited imagining about the learning I will have from all them here, but I still wanted to take time to think about working for a smaller sized organisation because I have never worked in one before. So, I took a week’s time to decide and made a final call on taking this role by the beaches of Goa (Oh! I went on a quick trip that week) and later confirmed the same to Akash.

Once I received the offer letter, I broke the news to my previous employer and started serving my notice period. When the festive month arrived, I was invited to the Diwali party of Appsecco. Like everyone else, I was given the Diwali gifts (Bose speakers and sweets :D) although I was yet to join. That was the nicest thing ever. I was really moved by that gesture. Akash then recommended me to read the book “Phoenix Project”. I started reading the book a week before joining and I must say that book is mind blowing. I am not even exaggerating. That book gives you so much perspective of running IT business and how important it is to have strategies in place for a successful business.

Joining day and first month

Finally, the day of joining was here. I reached office and received my work laptop. Akash, Riyaz & Gwilym gave me an overview of Appsecco process from security and business perspective. I made a list of questions had and noted them down after a recommendation from Akash & Gwilym to get everyone’s perspective on team’s understanding of the process. So, I think that explains my role here is to take care of project management tasks, client management and help Appsecco with process streamlining to make everyone’s work easy. I did have a 1–1 meeting with everyone to get an understanding and gather some analysis from that. I also had an opportunity to meet with one of our clients to understand client expectations and Appsecco’s experience in making their journey a smooth one with us. Something I love about Appsecco is their no-nonsense approach towards getting work done, be it with internal or external stakeholders.

I presented my analysis to Gwilym and Akash last week. They liked it, provided me few inputs & interesting business insights. I must say in the last one-month business has been making so much sense to me than ever before and I am loving it.

Fun at Appsecco

I am part of fun committee at Appsecco, hence I get to plan the fun events at work. We have Friday lunches & fun activities as part of employee engagement. We are also playing secret Santa secret this week and quite excited about it!

My co-workers

I have colleagues who make workplace interesting & fun. I knew most of them before joining through null community. Listening to Riddhi & Riyaz’s bad jokes is usually the highlight of my day, people who know me know how much I love bad jokes. Madhu Akula keeps teaching us the cool (‘kul’) stuff and he also helped me with finding a customised title, “Security Storyteller”. Isn’t that cool? About that, Appsecco employees have the privilege of choosing a customised title for themselves in addition to the formal designation. If you see me posting fancy pictures on our Friday outings on my social media, Sunesh’s photography skill is what you should be adoring. Then we have Abhishek, the hilarious guy who is always so high on enthusiasm even on Monday mornings and on the other hand, Bharath is the least talkative guy amongst us.

My first month has been quite an interesting one and I am excited about my journey ahead.

My story @ Appsecco was originally published in Appsecco on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.