All Episodes
Displaying 1 - 20 of 61 in total
Episode 1 — Decode the GPCS exam format, timing, and scoring with calm precision
This episode explains how the GIAC GPCS exam is structured so you can plan your study and test-day execution like an engineering problem instead of a stress event. You...
Episode 2 — Master GIAC testing rules, open-book boundaries, and proctoring realities
This episode focuses on the operational rules that shape your risk on exam day, because a correct answer doesn’t help if you trigger a policy issue or lose time to pre...
Episode 3 — Map today’s public cloud landscape risks without vendor blind spots
This episode builds a vendor-neutral threat and risk map for public cloud so you can answer exam questions that test principles, not brand trivia. You’ll frame the clo...
Episode 4 — Compare AWS, Azure, and GCP security strengths and weak defaults
This episode compares the big three cloud providers through the lens the exam cares about: what each does well, what defaults can betray you, and how the same security...
Episode 5 — Spot shared responsibility gaps that quietly create real cloud exposure
This episode clarifies shared responsibility in the way that prevents real incidents: not as a slogan, but as a control ownership model you can apply to any service. Y...
Episode 6 — Understand instance metadata APIs and why attackers love them
This episode explains instance metadata services as a high-value target in cloud environments, because they can expose identity tokens, configuration data, and privile...
Episode 7 — Assess metadata service hardening to block credential harvesting paths
This episode focuses on practical defenses for metadata attacks, emphasizing how to evaluate whether hardening is real or merely assumed. You’ll connect hardening cont...
Episode 8 — Detect and prevent metadata-driven privilege escalation across cloud workloads
This episode ties metadata abuse to privilege escalation outcomes so you can reason through exam questions that ask, “How does this become account compromise?” You’ll ...
Episode 9 — Build metadata-safe compute patterns that survive real attacker pressure
This episode shifts from point fixes to resilient patterns: how to design compute deployments that remain secure even when an application layer fails. You’ll learn wha...
Episode 10 — Identify credential exposure paths from workloads, images, and build pipelines
This episode surveys how credentials leak in cloud-native delivery, because many real incidents start with “temporary” secrets that quietly became permanent. You’ll de...
Episode 11 — Define cloud IAM fundamentals with least privilege as a living system
This episode establishes the IAM concepts the GPCS exam expects you to apply across cloud providers: principals (users, groups, roles, service identities), authenticat...
Episode 12 — Audit IAM policies for overreach, wildcard abuse, and accidental admin
This episode focuses on how to read and audit IAM policy documents the way an attacker and an auditor would, because the exam commonly probes your ability to spot “loo...
Episode 13 — Design role separation that stops privilege creep without breaking delivery
This episode teaches role separation as a design control that reduces both fraud risk and operational blast radius, and it shows up on the exam anytime duties, approva...
Episode 14 — Validate identity boundaries across accounts, subscriptions, and projects
This episode explains why cloud identity boundaries matter and how they are commonly implemented using multiple accounts, subscriptions, or projects to separate enviro...
Episode 15 — Enforce conditional access patterns that limit risk without killing usability
This episode covers conditional access as a control strategy for reducing identity risk by making access decisions depend on context, not just a password and a static ...
Episode 16 — Reduce permission blast radius with scoped roles and resource segmentation
This episode ties least privilege to blast-radius reduction by showing how role scope and resource segmentation work together to limit what any single identity can aff...
Episode 17 — Review and recall: cloud landscape, metadata, and IAM essentials together
This episode consolidates the foundational domains you’ve covered—cloud risk patterns, shared responsibility, instance metadata exposure, and IAM design—into one integ...
Episode 18 — Secure long-term credentials with storage patterns that resist theft
This episode explains why long-term credentials remain a persistent risk in cloud environments, even when teams prefer short-lived tokens, because legacy systems, vend...
Episode 19 — Reduce secret sprawl by redesigning how humans and services authenticate
This episode tackles secret sprawl as an architectural and governance problem: when credentials proliferate across scripts, teams, tools, and environments, you lose th...
Episode 20 — Operationalize credential rotation and revocation without fragile handwork
This episode focuses on turning credential hygiene into an operational capability, because the exam expects you to know not just that rotation is good, but how to exec...