In the previous article I covered all the steps and code that was required so that I can add a contact form with a reCaptcha on this very blog. These are the actual implementation steps I took to include them. Don’t worry the hard part has been done in part 1! Create contact form Using the client side HTML code I created the /content/contact.html file ensuring that I included the correct API Gateway URL’s for the post requests and the reCaptcha site key.
“You need to add reCaptcha to your webforms” - Its advice I’ve given out to security teams each time I see a malicious link or some spam pusher in the resulting email. Its the poor user who cops the brunt of them, increasing the chance of a click, increasing that chance of compromise. Reading through formspam is just a waste of time for everyone. I recall an instance where an internal securiy team miscofigured a tool they were using, set it to run overnight and that mailbox ended up with 35k+ emails in it.
In my last post, after updating the blog to use TLS1.2 and adding a CAA record thinking I would clear an A+ rating, I only retained an A rating. In this post I continue the journey striving for that A+ rating. Enabling HSTS It turns out that Mozilla observatory has a test you can also run, one that looks to be way stricter and they were not as impressed giving my site an F rating with a score of zero!
Last month in AWS saw me rack up a bill of US$0.86 and with the terrible US/AUD exchange rate I’m out of pocket a whole AUD$1.30. As im playing around with new technology and integrating various services that AWS provides, I touched a few services this month, and discovered I should probably decommission services I’m not actually using anymore. No surpise to me that I excceded the free tier limits for S3.
This is a project that I have wanted to get working for some time now, but everytime I tried it, it failed on me. There was always some dependency error or some random obscure error. I’ve used url2png.com in the past to capture screenshots of malicious and unknown websites, and while I have scripts that replicate this functionality via PowerShell, I’m not comfortable running that script on a production machine at work.
Email for the blog? well that was the next thing I was wanting to tick off the list. Not only for the blog (I’m 99.99% certain I wont ever get an email), but I’ve always wanted to just pass out throw away email addresses for when I attend conferences - just to see who’s giving my email address around. Luckily AWS have a solution called Simple Email Service (SES) which is designed for just this use case.
So the “Serverless for Beginners” is another lab based course brought to you by the folks at A Cloud Guru. Its course details how to build a video transcribing service with a web front end using multiple cloud technologies using node.js. It’s quite a cool little application, I’m not sure I have a real world use for such an application, but any “lab” that gets me to build with multiple technologies isn’t a bad thing when I’m studying for the exams.
So in my AWS studies I came across a course from edX titled “AWS Developer: Building on AWS”. This is an awesome course that gives you hands on experience with multiple services in AWS. Its structured in such a way where each week will only take a few hours to complete and there are 6 weeks of courses. If I recall as long as you are not “overly testing” your solution (which would have to be significant) you are unlikely to go over the free tier on AWS.
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