Ben Petito
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What Happens When Someone Asks Your API for Everything at Once?

A client had been bulk-loading data straight into the database with SQL, to speed up onboarding new customers. It’s a reasonable instinct, SQL is fast and easily repeatable with minimal effort, but writing directly to the database skips the permission checks, validation and auditing the application does for you. So I suggested our platform’s built-in REST API instead, and built them a Postman collection to try it. Somewhere in the testing they sent off a couple of requests with no page size on them, and the development server ran out of memory and fell over. Then it did it again.

  • Security
  • API
  • Enterprise
Sunday, August 16, 2026 | 4 minutes Read
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Never Trust Your Caller

A couple of weeks ago a security researcher published an excellent write-up of how they could have hijacked every live camera feed of the FIFA World Cup. There was no clever exploit involved. They registered as a football agent on FIFA’s public portal, which quietly added their account to the same Microsoft Entra tenant that runs FIFA’s internal platforms. When they browsed to the internal streaming system, the front end correctly showed them an access denied page. The backend, on the other hand, served everything they asked for - including the ingest URLs and stream keys for every camera at every match. Their own summary of the impact: they could have rickrolled the World Cup final.

  • Security
  • Architecture
  • Enterprise
Saturday, July 4, 2026 | 4 minutes Read
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Can a 2-Digit MFA Code Really Be More Secure Than 6?

I had an interesting chat with a co-worker a couple of weeks ago about Microsoft’s move to use a 2-digit MFA prompt instead of the traditional 6-digit time-based code. At first glance, that sounds like a downgrade; fewer digits must mean weaker security, right? But the truth is, the mechanism behind it is very different. Email codes and “magic links” Many applications send a one-time code or magic link to your email. While convenient, this is only as secure as your email account. If an attacker already has access to your inbox, they can trivially intercept those links and reset your password.

  • Security
  • MFA
  • Enterprise
Wednesday, April 15, 2026 | 3 minutes Read
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