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 integrated mental model that matches how GPCS questions often blend topics. You’ll revisit key definitions and, more importantly, practice linking them: how a cloud misconfiguration becomes exploitable, how a workload compromise can reach metadata, how harvested credentials translate into effective permissions, and how boundary design contains or amplifies impact. We’ll walk through a multi-step scenario where a web application flaw enables SSRF, SSRF reaches metadata, metadata yields a token, and that token’s permissions determine whether the incident is contained to one resource or becomes account-wide compromise. Along the way, you’ll identify the control points the exam expects you to recognize, such as token scope, role separation, resource segmentation, and logging evidence that proves what happened. The goal is to strengthen fast pattern recognition so you can eliminate distractors and choose the best defensive action under time pressure. Produced by BareMetalCyber.com, where you’ll find more cyber audio courses, books, and information to strengthen your educational path. Also, if you want to stay up to date with the latest news, visit DailyCyber.News for a newsletter you can use, and a daily podcast you can commute with.
