Stephen Rees-Carter - Defending the Hornburg - Laracon AU 2025

What does Helm’s Deep have to do with application security? At Laracon AU, Stephen's talk uses The Lord of the Rings to explain layered security, defence in depth, and why backups, MFA, and monitoring really matter. A practical guide to building more secure Laravel applications. 📚 ## Chapters 02:25 Helm’s Deep as trusted infrastructure 04:40 Secure defaults and building on solid foundations 05:45 Maintenance, updates, and patching 06:55 The Glittering Caves, backups, and incident response 10:05 Helm’s Dike, rate limiting, and DDoS protection 12:25 The Deeping Wall and multi factor authentication 14:40 The Hornburg, authorisation, and access control 15:15 Monitoring, logging, and seeing the attack 16:25 Defence in depth and layered security principles 18:00 Final thoughts on preparation and resilience https://x.com/valorin https://bsky.app/profile/valorin.bsky.social https://laracon.au