If you used Amazon’s Elastic Block Storage, you might want to check your settings.
New research just presented at the Def Con security conference reveals how companies, startups and governments are inadvertently leaking their own files from the cloud.
You may have heard of exposed S3 buckets — those Amazon-hosted storage servers packed with customer data but often misconfigured and inadvertently set to “public” for anyone to access.
“When you get rid of the hard disk for your computer, you know, you usually shredded or wipe it completely,” he said.
“That means anyone on the internet can download your hard disk and boot it up, attach it to a machine they control, and then start rifling through the disk to look for any kind of secrets,” he said.
One of Morris’ Def Con slides noting the types of compromised data found using his research, often known as the “Wall of Sheep” (Image: Ben Morris/Bishop Fox; supplied)
It is also time-saving, cost-effective, and extremely scalable service for all sorts of online businesses.
This is because the S3 system has been used for many years by more than 150,000 sites, as per the market research.
But such big AWS outage can affect the normal functioning of various websites, including, Medium, Expedia, and Health Commission.
According to the associates of Amazon, this outage was the result of a ‘human error’ when certain employees were fixing some billing issues in their system.
They mentioned in a post that an authorized member of their S3 team was using a developed playbook while executing a command that was supposed to eliminate small servers from one of their S3 subsystems during the S3 billing process.
Due to this error, Amazon had to check and restart all the services and systems again and it tools several hours to do so.
