How an empty S3 bucket can make your AWS bill explode

lengau@midwest.social to Programming@programming.dev – 187 points –
How an empty S3 bucket can make your AWS bill explode
medium.com
22

“By design” AWS bills project owners for unauthorized calls to the public S3 API.

So what I’m reading from this is you can do a billing attack on anything hosted in AWS so long as you know one of their bucket names.

Seriously, now that this is more widely known, it'll for sure be taken advantage of a lot, to the point AWS will begrudgingly protect their customers once the damage is done.

You shouldn't be charged for unauthorized requests to your buckets. Currently if you know any person's bucket name, which is easily discoverable if you know what you're doing, that means you can maliciously rack up their bill just to hurt them financially by spamming it with anonymous requests.

This is insane.

lol dude, I’ve known several people who have worked at AWS for years, and the amount of duct tape and bailing wire Mickey Mouse shit that I’ve heard goes on there just… does not inspire confidence.

Yeah in my last role we were probably the biggest user of a certain storage service that was still kinda new, there were quite a few times we found bugs, features that straight up didn't work how the documentation stated, and aws sent us workaround scripts that seriously looked like an unpaid intern wrote.

I'm not sure if GCP/Azure would be much different though.

As it turns out, one of the popular open-source tools had a default configuration to store their backups in S3. And, as a placeholder for a bucket name, they used… the same name that I used for my bucket.

It's completely insane that the tool would attempt to connect to a nonexistent bucket for backups by default instead of just... having them disabled completely?

AWS was kind enough to cancel my S3 bill. However, they emphasized that this was done as an exception.

Dicks.

Please use scribe.rip instead of medium.com for articles

https://nomedium.dev/

It's fine if you dislike a site. But the correct thing to do is not consume their content, not to work around it.

Medium is the journalistic version of the gig economy apps, mixed with a bit of digital landlording. The correct thing to do here is to bypass any of Mediums paywalls you might run in to.

This wasn't even paywalled, I just don't like Medium.

I abhor medium, but run across it a little while researching cybersecurity shit. I had no idea scribe.rip existed, so thanks for the plug.

Or use a browser extension to implement your preferences rather than push them onto others in a way that makes it harder for them to implement theirs.

If an article links to medium.com my redirects kick in, my link flagging kicks in and everything else. If everyone uses some different service to "fix" medium I am stuck with what they like. There is valuable to keeping the canonical URL.

I would also love to see domain blocks as a user preference in Lemmy. Just hide these sites that I don't like.

A great post, interesting and to the point.

I woke up yesterday morning and felt a little bit hazy. My feet tingled a little and that was an indication of what was going to happen. My podometric senses were tingling! Hahaha, get it? So anyway, after having a light breakfast and sitting down in front of my desk to check my emails, one in particular stood out. Being in a hurry however, I left for work and....

Article written like this are reason for me to stop reading. So annoying. This article is a breath of fresh air.

Anti Commercial-AI license