Serverless computing promises less operational overhead, faster deployment, and infinite scalability — but it doesn't promise security. The shared responsibility model means cloud providers manage the infrastructure, while everything above that line remains squarely in your hands. This episode of Cybersecurity unpacks the specific threats that emerge in serverless environments and what engineering and security teams need to do differently to stay ahead of them. The discussion draws from this in-depth guide on cloud-native serverless security best practices published by the team at SEC.

Here's what the episode covers:

• IAM misconfigurations as a top breach vector — Why overpermissioned function roles are so common, how the pressure of fast product launches creates dangerous shortcuts, and how tools like AWS IAM Access Analyzer can surface problems before attackers do.
• API Gateway hardening — The case for enforcing authentication and authorization through established standards like OAuth and JSON Web Tokens rather than rolling custom solutions, and why rate limiting belongs in every serverless deployment from day one.
• Securing the code itself — How insecure coding practices reach production not through carelessness but through deadline pressure, and why static analysis, code reviews, and runtime protections need to be automated into the pipeline rather than scheduled as afterthoughts.
• Supply chain risk and dependency scanning — The reality that every third-party library or package imported into a function is an uninspected link in a chain of custody, and how tools like Snyk and AWS CodeGuru can flag known vulnerabilities before they become two-in-the-morning incidents.
• Data security and storage misconfiguration — Why cloud storage defaults to public access far too often, how misconfigured buckets have driven some of the most embarrassing data breaches in recent memory, and why encryption at rest and in transit should be a baseline rather than an optional hardening step.
• Visibility, cold starts, and runtime monitoring — How the dormancy cycles unique to serverless functions create aging dependencies and abandoned-but-reachable deployments, why logging is only useful when someone — or something automated — is actually watching, and how real-time monitoring closes the dwell-time gap before damage compounds.

The episode closes with a broader mindset argument: serverless doesn't reduce your security obligations, it transforms them. Organizations that treat serverless security as a future problem tend to discover it's a present one when it's already too late. For more on securing cloud runtime environments, check out the related episode Cloud Egress Control: Policy-as-Code for Secure Runtime Traffic.

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