Hacker News and cyber news
Security threads, breach writeups, standards arguments, research drops, and the useful lesson buried under the comment-section heat.
essehbee.io — notes from the Zero Trust control plane.
Cloud posture, data security, and AI agents — written from the seat that has to actually deploy this stuff. Director-level post-sales for DSPM, CSPM, and AISPM. First person, no employer brand, no consulting pitch.
Zero Trust leadership
Director-level post-sales leadership operationalizing enterprise posture programs.
Data posture and AI
DSPM, CSPM, AISPM, tool grants, identity boundaries, and audit paths.
Cloud architecture
Networking, identity, benchmarks, cost controls, and exposure management.
Data-center roots
Started with racks, cables, power, remote hands, and change windows.
Control-plane review
Human identity
Operator intent, role, approval, accountability.
Agent runtime
Prompt, context, retrieved data, reasoning trace.
Tool grants
OAuth scopes, API keys, service accounts, actions.
Data plane
SaaS docs, buckets, tickets, repos, logs, exports.
Audit path
Who asked, what ran, what changed, who approved.
Blast radius
What the model can touch after it gets confused.
What I am tracking right now.
MCP and AI tool grants
Prompt injection is the table-stakes risk. The interesting boundary is what the product can do after the model believes the payload.
Cloud and identity posture
Cloud identity, service principals, secrets, logging, IaC drift, benchmarks, and the control-plane sprawl that makes breaches boringly predictable.
Data security and DSPM
Where data lives, who can read it, how it enters AI workflows, and which controls still work after the kickoff deck is gone.
On-prem lessons
Physical operations still teach useful instincts about blast radius, labels, change control, failure domains, and ownership.
Security leadership
Prioritization, risk framing, deployment reality, and the translation layer between executive anxiety and engineering constraints.
The background.
I have been in the work for a while. I started racking servers and pulling cables in a Tier 3 data center, moved through DevOps automation and cloud architecture, and now lead post-sales security work for enterprise posture programs.
My day-to-day work sits around Zero Trust, networking, cloud identity, data posture, cloud benchmarks, cloud cost controls, DSPM, CSPM, and AISPM deployments. I have seen the same problem at small companies and Fortune 50 estates: tools do not matter much if the operating model is vague.
This site is where I write the version that would not survive a vendor webinar. Expect practical skepticism, security news, HN-adjacent arguments, and a bias toward controls that operators can actually run.
- Former Tier 3 data center technician SOC, remote hands, cabling, rack work, power, and change windows.
- Former DevOps engineer Infrastructure automation, delivery systems, incident support, and build-and-run ownership.
- Cloud architect and posture operator Cloud identity, benchmarks, cost controls, logging, data posture, and security implementation tradeoffs.
- Director-level post-sales leader Enterprise DSPM, CSPM, and AISPM deployments without dragging the employer brand into personal writing.
Published notes.
The MCP server attack surface is bigger than vendors admit
Prompt injection is table stakes. The real question is what the product is allowed to do after the model believes it.
The control plane is the breach surface
Identity, deployment systems, secrets, logs, and API boundaries matter more than the diagram teams show in review.
DSPM is still a category, not a CSPM checkbox
Data posture telemetry has a different operating model than infrastructure posture telemetry.
Cloud cost controls are security controls now
The same sprawl that burns budget also creates unmanaged exposure, orphaned data, and weak accountability.
What on-prem got right about blast radius
Cloud made infrastructure faster. Physical operations still teach useful instincts about failure domains.
Prompt injection is a product-boundary problem
The control isn't at the prompt layer. It's at the tool execution layer — where the model's intent becomes a real API call.
AI data can leak quietly through workspace sharing
The leak isn't always a model output. Often it's a sharing default the agent inherited from a workspace that nobody audits.
Featured post · AI application security · 2026-05-15
The MCP server attack surface is bigger than vendors admit.
Prompt injection is table stakes. The harder question is what the product is allowed to do after the model believes the prompt.
The real boundary is downstream. The model has tools. The tools have OAuth grants, API keys, service accounts, and a cheerful ability to change production state. Treat the MCP server as a control-plane extension, not a chat feature — least privilege has to become product design, not security wallpaper.
Most cloud incidents are not about a single dramatic exploit. They are about identity, deployment systems, secrets, logs, and automation boundaries lining up badly.
Data posture needs lineage, classification, ownership, sharing paths, and remediation workflows. That is adjacent to CSPM, not a checkbox inside it.
Unowned compute and forgotten storage are not only budget problems. They are exposure, accountability, and data-retention problems.
Labels, dependency maps, change windows, physical blast radius, and ownership discipline still matter after the workload moves behind an API.
Slow cadence. High signal.
Send a strange security link, a cloud posture question, or a topic that deserves a cleaner writeup.