from Hacker News

Ask HN: What tricks do you use to protect yourself against cyber attack?

by ebfe1 on 3/21/25, 11:59 PM with 1 comments

Let’s hear it… As developers and engineers, I think we should all adopt the “assume breach” mentality.

Do you have your own personal tricks to stay safe?

I’ll start: I like to drop canary tokens on my personal machines, servers, and even in the AWS config file under the "admin" profile. I also use an old Raspberry Pi running knockd that triggers a simple bash script to alert me via Slack if someone scans my home network.

I used to have a cron job that hit my server’s website on specific URL paths, one for HTTP and a different one for HTTPS.

Each path included an encrypted version of current Wi-Fi name. Every time those endpoints were accessed, I’d get a Slack notification. The idea was that if someone managed to MITM my traffic and got curious enough to check the URLs, it would alert me.

There’s more, but I’m curious—what tricks do other HN-ers use?

  • by JohnFen on 3/22/25, 12:33 PM

    One of my tricks is to not reveal much about my security methods in a public internet forum. However, they include that my LAN (including WiFi) is only functional through a VPN that I run, and inside my "green zone", I focus more on tripwire systems to detect any unexpected file changes.