State Farm Engineering

Information contained in the articles on this site may not be representative of actual use cases. The views expressed in the articles are personal views of the author and are not necessarily those of State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company, its subsidiaries and affiliates (collectively “State Farm”). Nothing in the articles should be construed as an endorsement by State Farm of any non-State Farm product or service.

Red Team Research - Runspace Debugging by Michael Garrison

Finding creative opportunities for code execution and lateral movement

May 10, 2021

Tldr; Runspace debugging is a cool feature added into the .NET framework that allows developers to attach to a PowerShell Host (PSHost) process to debug a script. Once a process instantiates the PSHost, it never goes away, even if the runspace object is disposed. I submitted it as a bug to Microsoft and hopefully it will be fixed in the future. This can be used as a neat way to execute PowerShell code under someone else’s legitimate process or PowerShell session.

Women Supporting Women at State Farm

Mar 5, 2021

March is Women’s History Month, a time to celebrate the past contributions of women while making progress toward a more equitable future. There is much to celebrate about the contributions by women in the field of information technology. However, although more women are choosing IT careers, studies show that additional progress can be made.

Comparison of AWS Services for Event Driven Architecture by Jeff Himmell

Feb 8, 2021

Complicated highway interchange denotes the many possible paths

At State Farm® we’re about helping people. Helping people manage the risks of everyday life and recover from the unexpected is at the core of what we do. As it applies to technology, the Event Driven Architecture (EDA) pattern is especially useful for orchestrating multiple services in unforeseen situations. However, deciding on the best AWS product to use as the event bus can be daunting. This article will cover common considerations (such as scalability), as well as those that can make a bad…

Confidently deploy your content to S3 using Terraform - here's how we did it.

Jan 5, 2021

Today, many product teams may utilize the Amazon Simple Storage Service to store Single Page Application (SPA) resources. Oftentimes they do this by packaging infrastructure code with the application code. However, this tends to add complexity to the pipeline because the content for S3 must be uploaded and synched in a separate step.

Why your organization should embrace the Community Support model

Aug 20, 2020

It’s tough to find an organization that is not leveraging a public cloud platform. With all the SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS providers out there, chances are you’ve used cloud services in some manner. As public cloud utilization continues to ramp up in many industries (e.g., insurance, financial, business), organizations are encountering a new challenge: how to correctly consume these new platforms and technologies. It’s a workforce challenge more so than it is a technical challenge.