#Europol likely operated illegal, clandestine databases and intelligence tools – and the systems might still be in use. All while the transformation of Europol into a "truly operational police agency" is being prepared.

»Described by former officials as a “shadow IT environment”, the system lacked basic security or data protection safeguards required under #EU law. It was used to store and analyse highly sensitive data – phone records, identity documents and geolocation information – including details of people who were not suspected of a crime. […]

By 2019, the #CFN held at least two petabytes (PB) of data – almost 420 times bigger than Europol’s primary database for non-forensic work – and effectively held almost all of Europol’s operational data. […]

According to former insiders, the system was understood within parts of the agency as a space where operational data could be stored and analysed quickly without the constraints of EU law.«

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642525/They-protect-the-law-while-breaking-it-Inside-Europols-shadow-IT-system

#EUpol

Do you know that CloudFormation and AWS CDK can't write an entry of type SecureString to AWS SSM Parameter Store? I had no idea when I wanted to put a generated password to it as part of my Cfn Stack. I recently wrote a Blog [1] about it. Today I also published a Lambda function, written in Python [2]. Usable as CloudFormation custom resource. Works well for my use-case.

[1] https://dominik.wombacher.cc/posts/aws-cloudformation-and-cdk-doesnt-support-aws-ssm-parameter-store-securestring.html
[2] https://git.sr.ht/~wombelix/cfn-custom-resource-aws-ssm-securestring

#aws #awscdk #cdk #cloudformation #cfn #lambda #securestring #python

#AWS Question: I want to set a reverse DNS record on an EIP belonging to a NAT GW.

The IP is therefore managed by AWS (not in my hosted zone). So putting a PTR record in my hosted zone to that IP is not productive.

Now I can do this manually from the “Actions” menu on the EIP. And it works!

To the question: How would I go about doing that same operation in #Terraform? Or perhaps just throw me some #AWS native IaC samples (#CDK, #CFN, …)