Discovering a common Salesforce mistake launched this security professional’s career – Aaron Costello – ESW #379

Aaron was already a skilled bug hunter and working at HackerOne as a triage analyst at the time. What he discovered can't even be described as a software bug or a vulnerability. This type of finding has probably resulted in more security incidents and breaches than any other category: the unintentional misconfiguration.

There's a lot of conversation right now about the grey space around 'shared responsibility'. In our news segment later, we'll also be discussing the difference between secure design and secure defaults. The recent incidents revolving around Snowflake customers getting compromised via credential stuffing attacks is a great example of this. Open AWS S3 buckets are probably the best known example of this problem. At what point is the service provider responsible for customer mistakes? When 80% of customers are making expensive, critical mistakes? Doesn't the service provider have a responsibility to protect its customers (even if it's from themselves)?

These are the kinds of issues that led to Aaron getting his current job as Chief of SaaS Security Research at AppOmni, and also led to him recently finding another common misconfiguration - this time in ServiceNow's products. Finally, we'll discuss the value of a good bug report, and how it can be a killer addition to your resume if you're interested in this kind of work!

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