In software and infrastructure circles, “security by obscurity” is basically a punchline. It gets eye-rolls, smirks, and well-earned criticism. Hiding your systems—without actually protecting them—isn’t security.
Still… sometimes it works. Not by design. Just by chance.
It’s like hiding your wallet behind a neon curtain. Might fool a passerby. But any real thief? They’re walking straight through it. And when that curtain is the only thing between you and a $600K disaster? You’re playing with fire.
Let me show you two stories—where bad setups somehow survived. Until they didn’t.
Case 1: The API Nobody Noticed
Picture a mid-sized e-commerce company. Let’s call them Shopify-but-not-really.
The DevOps team got creative (read: reckless). Instead of using a proper API gateway, they built their own. And then? They posted API keys… to a public GitHub repo.
Their defense plan? “We’ve got a firewall. We’re good.”
They weren’t.
One day, a student scanning GitHub stumbled on the keys. Jackpot? Not quite. The URL pointed to a dead endpoint that just returned a 404. No data, no access, nothing useful. The hacker moved on.
No breach. No incident. But not because of smart planning. Just dumb luck.
An internal audit months later exposed the mess. Had the attacker poked around more, they could’ve drained up to $600,000—about 30% of the company’s annual revenue.
This wasn’t clever defense. It was a blindfold and a prayer.
Case 2: Froodles and the Invisible Ingress
Now meet Froodles—a startup that connects pet owners with groomers. They rushed to launch their shiny new Kubernetes platform. And in that rush? They left the front door wide open.
No auth. No firewalls. Just an NGINX ingress sitting there, exposed. Technically, anyone online could reach their cluster. But no one did—at least, not at first.
Then came Wednesday.
Traffic spiked. The logs lit up. Thousands of failed requests tried—and failed—to grab user data. Around 20,000 records were almost exposed.
What saved them? A quirk. The way internal paths were routed caused the requests to break. Froodles got lucky. Again.
The team panicked. Rewrote ingress rules. Turned on auth. Stayed up all night.
If those requests had succeeded, they’d be staring down millions in fines and reputational damage. Instead, they got a warning shot.
The Real Lesson: Obscurity ≠ Security
These aren’t success stories. They’re cautionary tales.
What saved these companies wasn’t strategy. It was silence. Obscurity bought them time—until someone actually looked.
So what should they have done?
Here’s what real security looks like—starting with basics in Kubernetes and AWS:
Kubernetes Ingress with Auth
apiVersion: networking.k8s.io/v1
kind: Ingress
metadata:
name: froodles-ingress
annotations:
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/auth-type: basic
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/auth-secret: my-secret
spec:
rules:
- host: froodles.example.com
http:
paths:
- path: /
pathType: Prefix
backend:
service:
name: froodles-service
port:
number: 80
Terraform S3 Bucket Policy
resource "aws_s3_bucket" "froodles_bucket" {
bucket = "froodles-secure-bucket"
acl = "private"
}
resource "aws_s3_bucket_policy" "froodles_policy" {
bucket = aws_s3_bucket.froodles_bucket.id
policy = jsonencode({
Version = "2012-10-17"
Statement = [
{
Effect = "Allow"
Principal = "*"
Action = "s3:GetObject"
Resource = "${aws_s3_bucket.froodles_bucket.arn}/*"
Condition = {
StringEquals = {
"aws:SourceAccount" = "MY_ACCOUNT_ID"
}
}
}
]
})
}
Final Thought
Security isn’t just about avoiding disaster. It’s about not relying on luck to do it.
If your system only survives because no one took a close look? That’s not safety. That’s suspense.
Eventually, someone will pull back the curtain.
So skip the magic tricks. Choose visibility. Choose verification. Choose real security.