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In 2014, security researchers discovered a critical vulnerability in the HSBC mobile banking app for iOS. The app was found to be susceptible to man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, allowing attackers to intercept and manipulate sensitive financial information. The root of the problem? The absence of SSL pinning. Without SSL pinning, the app was vulnerable to accepting any SSL certificate, even a forged one, which enabled attackers to eavesdrop on the communication between the app and HSBC’s servers. This security flaw put users’ banking information at risk and highlighted a significant gap in the app’s security framework. ...

Joshua had been waiting anxiously for weeks. As an aspiring clerk, he knew that the government official’s appointment order could arrive any day. This appointment was crucial—it would determine his future and career. Every morning, Joshua checked his local post office, hoping that today would be the day the letter arrived, confirming his new position. In many ways, Joshua’s experience mirrors how Kafka, a powerful distributed streaming platform, manages and delivers data. Just like how Joshua relies on the postal system to receive his appointment letter, modern data systems depend on Kafka to ensure that critical information reaches its intended recipients quickly and reliably. ...

A few weeks ago, I got a task from my manager that seemed straightforward at first: set up a development environment for one of our upcoming projects. The catch? It needed to be accessible over HTTPS, just like our production sites. Now, getting a certificate from a trusted Certificate Authority (CA) for a development environment didn’t make much sense, and we certainly didn’t want to incur extra costs or deal with the complexities of a CA for something internal. ...

I remember the first time I encountered YAML—it was during a seemingly regular workday when a Kubernetes task landed on my desk. I had been managing infrastructure the traditional way for years, but suddenly, here was this new ecosystem that used a format I hadn’t seen before: YAML. It was frustrating at first. The simple indentation of a line could break everything, and I was far too comfortable with JSON and XML. But as Kubernetes became indispensable, and Ansible, Docker Compose, and other tools followed suit, it became clear that YAML wasn’t just a passing trend—it was the new standard. ...

In today’s interconnected world, securing online communication is paramount. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) acts as the backbone of this security, ensuring that sensitive information transferred over networks remains encrypted and trustworthy, facilitating secure communication between servers and users. A crucial component of this infrastructure is the TLS certificate, widely used to secure websites. Let’s delve into how PKI and TLS certificates work to provide encryption and trust in digital transactions. ...