28 ms·

My Amazon S3 Mistake

349 points by DevFactor 12y ago

amluto 12y ago
There really ought to be a way to cap your bill. Alarms aren't enough when large bills can be run up overnight.
- PhantomGremlin 12y ago
  Yeah, I don't get it. Why doesn't an account automatically come with, let's say, a $100/mo default cap. And also a $25/day default cap. Someone playing around would just leave those defaults alone and thereby not wind up looking like a total fool. Using Wikipedia for a guide, a micro instance only costs $0.013 per hour. An instance with 30 GiB memory and 8 cores only costs $1.00 per hour. So the cap numbers I suggested would work fine for many people. For some reason Amazon allows people to shoot themselves in the foot too easily. Yes, they usually? waive the charges, but it seems like such a waste of resources, overall. It wouldn't be so bad if bitcoin mining were more profitable. But $1000 spent at Amazon probably mines $10 or less in bitcoin. What a waste of energy.
- donavanm 12y ago
  And what would the action be when that limit is reached? Terminate all your EC2 instances? Delete your objects from S3/Glacier? Destroy all your RDS/DynamoDB/SDB tables? Disable your CloudFront CDN assets? Stop returning DNS answers from Route 53? This blog genre would then be "Amazon deleted all my stuff and ruined my business because they didnt think I'd pay $26". As the story notes they tried to reach out multiple times using multiple contacts. There are also existing tools for setting up specific billing alerts if you really want to take some action at $26.
hox 12y ago
And please for the love of all that is secure, use IAM roles. Even for your personal things. it's not that hard and you can stop things like this from happening even with the auth credentials.
matteotom 12y ago
You can use AWS IAM (https://aws.amazon.com/iam/ https://aws.amazon.com/iam/) to help prevent something like this. AFAIK you can create a sub-account that only has access to specific resources, such as S3, and use the keys from that sub-account. I haven't used it much, but it looks like you can be very specific in what you allow, such as only allowing access to a single bucket with S3, or a single domain with SES.
- tekromancr 12y ago
  You totally can be very specific about what actions and services an IAM key has access to. The permissions model takes a bit to get your head around (It did me, at least) but once you do, you can have very strict, precise permissions for your keys.
- stevekemp 12y ago
  Yes that's correct. I use a specific key for only allowing DNS updates to be applied to "example.com" and no other domain, for example. As others have mentioned the billing alerts are also a useful thing, along with the IAM Simulator.
aakilfernandes 12y ago
This seems to be bad design on Amazon's part as well. There should be some kind of manual thresholding in place to make sure this doesn't happen.
- hox 12y ago
  There is, hence the emails and phone calls that were missed.
  - ryanfitz 12y ago
    Amazon also places limits on all of its services. I would think one of the reasons for these default limits is to help with cases of abuse. You can learn more about them at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws_service_limits.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws_service_lim...
- jerrysievert 12y ago
  amazon has limits that take time to increase, which has me scratching my head - we've always had to put in a support ticket whenever moving past those limits, for instance the 50 server limit we reached.
cortesoft 12y ago
Also, if you ever accidentally leak your keys... CHANGE THEM!
riquito 12y ago
> I learned a valuable lesson here though. Don’t trust .gitignores and gems like Firago for keeping your data safe. Open source is awesome, but if you are dealing with anything that can be scaled up to thousands of dollars per hour – at least store it in a private repo if not on your local machine. You learned the wrong thing :-P The lesson here is "always check what you're committing"
- jrochkind1 12y ago
  That and: Immediately invalidate any auth information that was accidentally published, no matter how briefly. I realize I haven't always followed this advice myself. So the reminder from the OP story is useful.
- fein 12y ago
  As an additional layer of safety, you can also commit to a local repo, or a private bitbucket repo, and give it all a nice once over before pushing everything to GH. At least this keeps your screw ups out of public scope.
  - zo1 12y ago
    Isn't that what you're doing anyways when you use a DCVS? Granted, I use mercurial. It has two components on your side, your working directory, and the actual repo. Committing moves changes from your working directory, and saves them to a branch on your local repo. Then you get the local repo to push that change to a remote one. In essence, "committing" then is the act of pushing your changes to your local repo. Or you could, you know, just look at the changes on disk if really required.
    - coldpie 12y ago
      Yes, that's how Git works. I'm not sure what fein meant.
cheald 12y ago
There are a few lessons here: 1. Use IAM roles. AWS keys should only have access to the specific functionality they need. Best practice is to never use your root credentials for anything; always use IAM users and use unique keys for each use case, so that you can invalidate and replace them easily. Every time documentation or a tutorial asks you to insert AWS keys, your response should be "let me go create a role for that" rather than "let me go look those up". 2. More importantly, if you ever accidentally publish or leak credentials, don't try to clean it up by deleting those commits. Invalidate the credentials immediately and re-issue them. 3. Always, always `git diff HEAD` before committing. Know what you're about to push up. This isn't just a security concern - the number of small, stupid things you'll catch that you'd otherwise end up fixing 15 seconds later is substantial. As a bonus, this incentivizes you to keep your commits small and atomic. You might talk to Amazon directly - they've been known to forgive debts like these in these kinds of circumstances.
- pktgen 12y ago
  > You might talk to Amazon directly - they've been known to forgive debts like these in these kinds of circumstances. They did: > Lucky for me, I explained my situation to Amazon customer support – and they knew I wasn’t bitcoin mining all night. Amazon was kind enough to drop the charges this time…
  - cheald 12y ago
    Whoops. I missed that. Glad the author was able to dodge that bullet!
    - jmiwhite 12y ago
      This was my initial reaction too, but I was pleased to find it's just a slightly misleading title :)
      - pbreit 12y ago
        On HN I recall the title originally including the $2300 (which matched the blog post's title). Now the HN title does not include the $ amount. Did the mods make that change? I would think preserving the source's title would generally take precedence even if a bit misleading.
SwellJoe 12y ago
Hell, even without making the mistake of publishing keys, I've accidentally run up quite large bills for Amazon services; backups that failed to remove old copies was a big one. Instances that were supposed to have been shut down, but for some reason it didn't happen (I don't know if this is my mistake or a bug at Amazon...probably my mistake). I've simply stopped using Amazon for anything tinkery, because the costs of making mistakes can be tremendous. At least when I make mistakes on my own colocated server, I know it can never cost me more than the $100/month I pay to host it. And, storage is practically infinite (4TB hard disks), and I can spin up more VMs than I would ever need for tinkering in 32GB of RAM on our "spare" server. And, when I have needed to use VM with some cloud host...Linode and Digital Ocean and similar may have dramatically smaller toolsets for managing virtual resources than Amazon (probably unworkably so for large deployments), but my mind has a much easier time predicting costs than with Amazon. After being surprised on more than one occasion with a ~$300 bill from Amazon (for running nothing but personal pet projects with no economic return), I turned everything off.
- mhink 12y ago
  Something similar has happened to me, on a smaller scale. I was recently checking my bank account, and noticed a charge from AWS for something like $15. After further investigation, I had apparently been charged this $15 for about 6 months. Hmm. Logging into AWS and checking the Cost Explorer showed that I had been charged for a t1.small EC2 instance I had running, but when I logged into the AWS console, all I saw was a single "stopped" instance. There's no way I was being charged for cycles I'm not using, right? Turns out that the instance I was being charged for was in us-west, and I had only been looking at us-east- and there is no indication within the actual EC2 panel that you have instances in other regions! I was a bit perturbed, to say the least...
  - fletchowns 12y ago
    Not sure why you didn't click on "Billing & Cost Management" where you can see a complete breakdown (by resource and region) of exactly what you are being charged for.
mylons 12y ago
mildly sensational conclusion. his real lesson should be "this is how i learned how to use github."
- freeall 12y ago
  Agreed. But the discussion here on Github is pretty good and tells us that it's happened to quite a lot of people. So the headline might be a bit sensational, but it's a real problem.
  - mylons 12y ago
    definitely. but he's blaming it on learning rails in a way. this is coming from someone who did this at one of their jobs. i accidentally committed AWS keys, and we had dozens of servers launched on our account in minutes. was insane.
moe 12y ago
Lesson 1: Don't publish your passwords. Lesson 2: When using AWS then use Billing Alarms[1]. It takes about 1 minute to setup and enables e-mail or SMS notifications at dollar-thresholds of your choice. [1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/create-billing-alarm.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/...
- FireBeyond 12y ago
  The corollary to that is the first thing such people/scripts do when they have access to your account is disable Billing Alarms.
  - rifung 12y ago
    Are you sure you can disable billing alarms with just your access/secret key? I thought you would need to know the user name + password for that
    - TheDong 12y ago
      Having root credentials is sufficient, and based on the fact that this guy said "apparently the s3 api lets you spin up ec2 instances" it looks like he didn't touch IAM. Root credentials are deprecated, but can still be used and if this guy used them then yes, his billing alarms could have been disabled. There's a difference between an admin iam user (can't do billing stuff) and the root credentials (just as powerful as username / password).
  - mkale 12y ago
    Maybe they should send an email/SMS to notify you that email/SMS had been disabled. (And, an email/SMS to the old address when the email/SMS is changed too.)
mattkrea 12y ago
There seems to be some serious confusion here if this dev thinks you can spin up EC2 instances with the S3 API. Perhaps one lesson here aside from keeping keys outside of public repositories is to learn how an API works (IAM, arns, etc) before using it.
lxe 12y ago
> Actually hooking into the API was very straightforwards, and didn’t take more than an hour to set up. I have learned that if this is the case, I'm doing something wrong with my AWS setup.
- hyperliner 12y ago
  Yours is a great observation! With great power comes great responsibility. If you find that you got great power but don't feel you got great responsibility, then chances are you are doing it wrong.
smsm42 12y ago
If the criminals can create a bot to scan for AWS keys, I wonder if github can't create a plugin to detect the same and warn the committer or maybe limit access to this data to original committer only. It won't be 100% but I bet the bots aren't 100% either, so if it covers most of the cases it would still be useful. Or maybe just have a script on local github pre-commit hook?
- fletchowns 12y ago
  I don't think it's github's responsibility to prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot.
  - smsm42 12y ago
    It's not an obligation, but neither is running a free git repository :) It would be a nice help though. One that can save some people $2k - not many software features have this kind of immediate impact :)
  - slapresta 12y ago
    Well, no, but it would be a nice-to-have.
  - hamburglar 12y ago
    Nobody said it was their responsibility. If adding an optional feature that prevents you from shooting yourself in the foot makes people like github more, maybe it's worth it to them. "Responsibility" has nothing to do with it.
    - balls187 12y ago
      Would have to make it an option, because we check in various AWS keys into private repos. Also how do you differentiate an AWS root key (bad) vs an IAM Key (good)?
      - mod 12y ago
        Maybe you should rethink your policy either way. In my circles, at least, it's standard practice to use environment variables. But I would think clearly it'd be an option.
jorgecastillo 12y ago
Damn! I know one thing for sure after reading this, I am not even trying AWS until I really really know what I am doing. For now I'll stick with VirtualBox and DigitalOcean.
coralreef 12y ago
Is it not possible to setup some sort of dollar value or bandwidth maximum and freeze the account upon reaching that value?
- DevFactor 12y ago
  I wish! $100/mo cap would save a lot of these accounts from being hacked. My mistake was not unique, and if you browse around on Google you will find other authors who have had the same issues.
- nni 12y ago
  For Amazon it is certainly possible, imo. They just don't do it, AFAIK. An alert that you might or might not get is obviously not as reliable as a hard limit.
CJefferson 12y ago
Is there an easy way of putting a strict limit on the amount of money I'm willing to spend on AWS?
- eastbayjake 12y ago
  I haven't seen anything about limits, but they do let you set alerts when you pass a user-specified spending threshold.
zatkin 12y ago
I used some app to upload a 250GB archive to Amazon Glacier. Turns out the app was having difficulties uploading it all at once, and its queue functionality sucked. I explained this to Amazon, since they were suggesting that I use that app to begin with. Turns out I ended up using terabytes of data usage just getting everything up to Glacier because the app was faulty. They tried to bill me something like $1500, but I never paid for it and just had my data removed immediately.
zatkin 12y ago
I used some app to upload a 250GB archive to Amazon Glacier. Turns out the app was having difficulties uploading it all at once, and its queue functionality sucked. I explained this to Amazon, since they were suggesting that I use that app to begin with. Turns out I ended up using terabytes of data usage just getting everything up to Glacier because the app was faulty. They tried to bill me something like $1500, but I never paid for it and just had my data removed immediately.
nadams 12y ago
I think a lot of the comments here are good - but a thing to keep in mind with github is that their free repo hosting is by default - public. Which means that your code is indexed and searchable - by anyone visiting github including anonymous users. They do give you free private repos if you are a college student or professor. I am a big advocate of self hosting - not because services like github suck (in fact I'm a big fan of github, bitbucket and other services) but you have more control over your own code (that and you can setup private repos). Here is a small list of self hosted solutions (I forked indefero into srchub - many don't like the google code feel but I personally like it for the simplicity and the fact I can easily fix/modify/add on to it): http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/3506/self-hosted-replacements-for-mercurial http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/3506/self-ho...
- fragmede 12y ago
  FYI, bitbucket and possibly other services offer private repos for free (in order to compete with GitHub).
  - nadams 12y ago
    tl;dr; free services are fine - just make sure you have backups of all your data For most individual projects - they are probably good enough. However, the thing to keep in mind is that for free they usually limit features (I think bitbucket limits the number of developers) or remove features all together (google code removing downloads support, github did at one time but reintroduced it). I'm not saying that I think they should be offering everything for free and shouldn't take away features - they have to make money - but in my opinion always have backups and a plan B in case you need to jump ship. I was a huge google code fan (the design isn't Web 2.0 with social integrations - but I prefer functional over design) until they pulled the plug on downloads support (which for most Linux people isn't a big problem - a make && make install and it's compiled AND installed - for Windows it's not that easy). Which forced me to self host - I do mirror many of my public projects on github but in the event github management decides to remove/reduce a feature I won't be struggling to find a new "home" for my ~100+ projects. Also - if you look at the issue tracker for google code it's pretty obvious that Google is no longer supporting or even monitoring it (several spam issues have been appearing). I don't have a crystal ball - but my best guess is that Google will pull the plug on Google Code as well. And it would make sense - most people have already "fled" Google Code for github/bitbucket etc. With that said - let me put on my tin foil hat and say that even if we ignore any potential future issues there could be potential privacy issues if you upload your code to a private repo hosted by someone else. I'm personally not the type to snoop, but that might not stop some lowly intern from getting curious. Or even some bug on their site that makes private repos public (for a short time anyways). Did you hear about the time that Dropbox made passwords optional for four hours [1]? [1] - http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/20/dropbox-security-bug-made-passwords-optional-for-four-hours/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/20/dropbox-security-bug-made-p...
jakejake 12y ago
I'm not at all surprised to learn of bots cruising github looking for keys. I think a good lesson is that if you ever accidentally expose your API key - revoke or delete them immediately and generate new key.
je42 12y ago
mmmh. Using s3 key/secret to launch ec2 instances ? Does anybody have the pointer to the docs for that ?
- fletchowns 12y ago
  They were probably using their root credentials instead of creating a narrowly focused IAM profile.
- je42 12y ago
  found it. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSecurityCredentials/1.0/AboutAWSCredentials.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSecurityCredentials/1.0/AboutA...
  - je42 12y ago
    mmh. i think the author mentioned this as well: weren't these in the past just for S3 ?
iancarroll 12y ago
I've said this before, but AWS billing support is usually quite sympathetic to your situation if you've made a mistake. They've dropped $120 in spot instance charges I had which went way over what I expected.
alinenache 12y ago
Buyers in a perfect world
alinenache 12y ago
Buyers in a perfect world http://waltherpragerandphilosophy1.blogspot.com/2014/12/buyers-in-perfect-world.html http://waltherpragerandphilosophy1.blogspot.com/2014/12/buye...
driverdan 12y ago
I'm surprised no one else mentioned the Heroku mistake of putting config in a file instead of an environment variables. Settings like API keys should always be in env vars on Heroku, not in a config file.
- theGimp 12y ago
  If I understand you correctly, Heroku does make that possible. You can use Heroku Toolbelt or their web dashboard to add environment variables. Adding environment variables to a file is just a convenience.
projectramo 12y ago
The same thing happened to me. Almost exactly. Rails again. S3 bucket for images. Following along with 1monthrails this time. Pushed the key, fell asleep, awoke to Amazon warnings and a $2000+ bill. Also removed. I wonder how often this happens. Are they mining bitcoins?
- projectramo 12y ago
  I now use bitbucket.
- Buge 12y ago
  It would be really stupid to mine bitcoins. I assume they were mining litecoins or some other more GPU/CPU friendly coin.
  - jmnicolas 12y ago
    Why ? It's slow but it cost them nothing ...
    - Buge 12y ago
      Because they can make money much faster with litecoin. To illustrate this, EC2 GPU instances have a NVIDIA Kepler GK104 with 1536 cores, so that is like the GTX680. It gets 120 MHash/s on bitcoin, which translates to 2 cents per month. It gets 207 kHash/s on litecoin, which translates to 32 cents per month. I think on vertcoin you could get 90 cents per month.
      - jmnicolas 12y ago
        Wow the effectiveness of GPU for mining Bitcoin has dropped dramatically since last time I looked at it (admittedly a couple years ago). If I remember well you could make a few hundred bucks a month with just one high end ATI graphic card.
- DevFactor 12y ago
  Amazon support told me (at least the ones spun up on my account), where indeed bit-coin miners.
ljk 12y ago
>Over the holidays, I opted to try to teach myself Ruby & it’s companion Rails. shouldn't it be "its"?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - Gigablah 12y ago
    Don't need an English major for that :)
jedberg 12y ago
Amazon has been really proactive in protecting against these kinds of things. They seem to be searching the web constantly for API keys, because they'll send you emails that say "hey we found your key here, you better do something about that".
kephra 12y ago
The expensive mistake was to use Amazon at all. An own domain name costs about $1/month, an OVH root server less then $10. Install a minimal Debian and Linux Containers on it, and expand your own cloud, if you need it, e.g. by extending with cheap Hetzner servers.
- vertis 12y ago
  Regardless of what service (AWS, Linode, Rackspace, OVH) if you leak keys or passwords you have the potential for costs incurred by malicious users. I have not used OVH, but a quick perusal of the OVH API[1] suggests that you could invoke plenty of commands that would incur costs. [1] https://api.ovh.com/console/#/order https://api.ovh.com/console/#/order
  - Dylan16807 12y ago
    But your app would not have any keys. You would give it a server and that would be it. There's no API use in a toy project, and so no way to leak account authentication.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Xorlev 12y ago
I thought new AWS accounts came by default with a 20 instance limit...
- theGimp 12y ago
  They do, but the bigger instances cost a lot to rent.
- t0mas88 12y ago
  Yes, but 20x the largest instance option is expensive. The limits at Rackspace Cloud are a bit more sane, they limit the total "size" instead of number of instances. So you can run many small ones without hitting the default limit, but not as many large (expensive) ones.
  - Xorlev 12y ago
    The author just mentioned that there were 140 servers in his account. I do know how expensive the servers can be.
plasma 12y ago
Maybe Github can reject commits by default that contain phrases of magic keys/known strings and file combinations that contain passphrases.
- logn 12y ago
  I'd rather Github not become the Gmail of version control.
  - jagger27 12y ago
    Github is already the Gmail of version control. Isn't this the reason the attack is possible? Every file is automatically indexed for search.
    - logn 12y ago
      Yes. However I meant that I don't want Github to start developing features that involves scanning and applying AI to codebases and their users' behavior, because I think it's a temptation they start marketing that data. E.g., "Buy our engineer intelligence subscription! Find out if your job applicant is a ninja or noob!" I suppose there's an argument that the data is already public and anyone could apply that analysis, which is true. But the difference is that Github is not profiting from this; their feature development will continue to focus on private repo owners as their customers (whose interests are pretty much aligned with public repo owners).
lexalizer 12y ago
This happens very often. Like many others have recommended, disable the global AWS keys and use roles.
vertis 12y ago
I documented a similar experience just over a year ago[1]. I ended up helping give a talk about my experience at the Amazon Summit in Sydney. I hope I made a good cautionary tale to the devs/ops/managers attending. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911908
bigsassy 12y ago
The same thing happened to my brother. He's been teaching himself software development for a while, and learned the same painful lesson about securing your keys. This was despite the things he did right, like: 1. Used IAM roles (but he didn't lock down it's permissions nearly enough clearly) 2. Used two factor authentication. http://snaketrials.com/2014/11/11/espionage/ http://snaketrials.com/2014/11/11/espionage/ http://snaketrials.com/2014/11/12/espionage-update/ http://snaketrials.com/2014/11/12/espionage-update/ I should note Amazon forgave the money his account owed, given it was his first time making this mistake on their systems. Amazon told him the servers were probably being used to mine bitcoins. edit - Oh, and on his blog he says it was $2000 over 12 hours. It turned out to be $5000 over 2 hours!
ams6110 12y ago
Had a very similar thing happen to a co-worker... accidentally pushed an AWS key to github, and over $7,500 in charges before it was noticed. Fortunately it was forgiven.
mc_hammer 12y ago
Why do people use this? for $3000 you can run like 6 4ghz machines with 12 gb ram out of your house with like 10mbs up and 50mbs down. I seriously believe the % of customers of amazon computing that actually need it is like 1%.
- shortstuffsushi 12y ago
  Why do people use Amazon? A number of reasons. Do I want to buy and manage servers myself? Would I pay for an additional computer to host my little toy Rails app? Will my ISP allow me to route network traffic to my personal IP with a standard plan? Most, at least that I've seen, prevent you from hosting. For a little project something like the author of this article described, using virtual hosting is significantly easier (and more realistic). If you're going to run an enterprise operation, bringing that sort of hardware in house might make sense, but a lot of larger companies are still pushing that hosting out to places like Amazon as well. Now, if you're asking why Amazon would allow (new) customers to scale up to $3000 worth of hosting overnight, maybe that's a separate issue. But how should Amazon judge that? There are probably users who want to jump straight up to that sort of scale. And evidently they did detect that the author didn't seem to fit that use case -- they actually called him about it pretty much right away.
theGimp 12y ago
In addition to the steps mentioned above, one thing that has kept me safe from my own heedlessness is to never, ever store credentials in a source code tree. If your project is reading credentials from a file, rewrite it so it reads them from environment variables. Most IDEs make it very easy to do that, and Python's virtual environments can do that work for you. Yes, it takes more effort, and sometimes it will be a little convoluted[1]. However, it's well worth the effort as you will have a system that you can put your faith in rather than having to double check every time in order to make sure you're not about to inadvertently commit your API keys. [1] Example of my own: Pycharm does not read variables stored in a virtual environment's configuration, so I have to set them twice.
i386 12y ago
Always put your API keys in an environment variable or ~/.
hisyam 12y ago
> Unfortunately the Rails tutorial is pretty bland so about half way through I decided to snoop around to see what my options where. Somehow, almost by chance I ended up a subscriber on Lynda. Lynda only has one Rails tutorial, but its pretty in depth and is backed by a five hour Ruby tutorial. I had the situation in reverse. I found the Lynda.com rails tutorials first (in 2011) and I found it lacking compared to Rails Tutorial. I'm not sure what's the situation now, from Lynda.com website it seems the author (Kevin Skoglund) has updated the tutorials for Rails 4.
mdnormy 12y ago
PSA If you're running AWS, I highly recommend for all developers and sysadmin to attend AWS free training[0][1]. While you're at it might as well get yourself certified[2]. You might have senior expertise with system operation and application deployment but sometimes, AWS approach things differently. The essence of the training is to always implement best practices, not just solving problem. Also use the opportunity of AWS event to network with their Solution Architect. Trust me on this one. This worth more than AWS Enterprise Support. [0] http://aws.amazon.com/training/course-descriptions/architect/ http://aws.amazon.com/training/course-descriptions/architect... [1] http://aws.amazon.com/training/course-descriptions/architecting-advanced/ http://aws.amazon.com/training/course-descriptions/architect... [2] http://aws.amazon.com/certification/ http://aws.amazon.com/certification/
- pen2l 12y ago
  Erm, is it really free? I just followed your link, which lead me to https://www.aws.training/home?courseid=3&language=en-us&source=web_en_course-descriptions_architect https://www.aws.training/home?courseid=3&language=en-us&sour... ... which lead me to http://www.globalknowledge.com/training/course.asp?pageid=9&courseid=24526&country=United+States http://www.globalknowledge.com/training/course.asp?pageid=9&... ... and there I find out it's $2095 USD. Hopefully I'm mistaken... because I'd love to take it if it's free!
  - mdnormy 12y ago
    I just noticed that free training session seems to be limited to certain location sold by "Amazon Web Services". For example Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok are free, but other location have varying fees. I attended 2 free session in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore back in June. I always assume its free for all. Sorry
    - astine 12y ago
      Huh, a round trip to Kuala Lumpur is less than the course in the States.[1] Best excuse for an overseas flight I've seen lately. https://www.hipmunk.com/flights/WAS-to-KUL#!dates=Jan12,Jan14&pax=1 https://www.hipmunk.com/flights/WAS-to-KUL#!dates=Jan12,Jan1...
fragmede 12y ago
The github help page* literally states "Danger.. If you committed a key, generate a new one." In a box. In Red. I'm not sure how much clearer GitHub could make that. *https://help.github.com/articles/remove-sensitive-data/ https://help.github.com/articles/remove-sensitive-data/
- mikeryan 12y ago
  I use github every day. I've never read nor seen that page.
bbcbasic 12y ago
I wonder how much crypto they mined? Probably $1 worth but still worth it for them!
logicallee 12y ago
why doesn't Amazon just ask you on sign-up if you're going to be mining coins, and if you say no, require specific authorization from you (outside of the usual key) to start doing so? Then until you authorize it, they can just not run mining instances on your behalf. surely it's easy for them to tell when this is being done? EDIT: this got downvoted, but I stand by it, plus it's a question, so you could reply and answer it. In my thinking it's the same reason there's a daily ATM withdrawal limit set by default. You can lift it, but it's there to reduce incentive (payoff from trying to see your PIN and then stealing your ATM card.) the current policy is like the bank calling you and saying, "ummm, I hope you know you've already withdrawn $7,000 and seem to be continuing." Given that bitcoin is (literally) cash, it seems to me saner to not run bitcoin mining instances by default, unless you authorize it specifically. or can they not tell?
- cthalupa 12y ago
  Bitcoin mining is not a service offered on AWS - they are spawning up EC2 instances, which are virtual machines you have root access to. From there you can mine bitcoins or do whatever else you want. Amazon doesn't have access to the data on the instance, or a list of processes running inside of it, or similar.
  - logicallee 12y ago
    I know, but even without root isn't it trivial for Amazon to unambiguously tell that this is what the VM's are doing, without looking at anything else on the instances? How can you run virtual machine instances without knowing what the CPU's and GPU's are doing? (There is no mathematical 'private computing' or secret computing over untrusted hardware, i.e. hardware run by other people, that is used in practice anywhere in the world, where for fancy mathematical reasons the operator has no idea what the CPU or GPU of the instance they're running for someone is actually computing. It's not even a cryptographic primitive people know about, and certainly not something performed by hypervisors.) The CPU or GPU pattern of bitcoin mining must be completely unambiguous and trivial for Amazon to detect on EC2 instances. Or am I wrong for some reason?
dilap 12y ago
Yeah, I did that, though in my case it was a bitbucket repo I thought was private, but somehow ended up public (obviously stupid to ever be checking in the keys at all). All I had setup was a micro S3 instance I'd been using for some toy craigslist scraping & hadn't touched for months. Then out of the blue I get an "urgent please check your account" email from amazon. Go check the AWS console, and what do you know -- maximum number of maxed-out instances instances churning away with 100% CPU usage in every region on earth. The charges were already about to $50,000 when I turned everything off. I wrote a very, very apologetic email to amazon, and they forgave all the charges, for which I was very grateful. Definitely a learning experience.
Illniyar 12y ago
"Turns out through the S3 API you can actually spin up EC2 instances" Can you really use the S3 API to spin up EC2 instances? or is the guy just mixing the fact that the credentials he used for S3 can be used for other AWS APIs ?
- mdnormy 12y ago
  > Can you really use the S3 API to spin up EC2 instances? No. My guess would be credential with allow:* service access.
wazoox 12y ago
I must be very old or very paranoid, but I wouldn't for one second think of developing from scratch using only public infrastructure. If I want to learn rail, I'd start by installing it and running it on my local PC. What's the point of relying on heroku, aws, etc for just everything? What's the point of using github as the main hub for everything? I'm synchronizing stuff to github explicitly and carefully, my casual, day-to-day operations are all running on my own hardware, network and services. Even my most simple websites run first at home, then are sync'ed to the web after I've checked everything works fine.
fat0wl 12y ago
Some old man Java rambling for you. :) (I am ex-Rails actually) one of the big things about Java that at first I thought was tedious but now have come to love is the build process. By creating the "built" project in a new folder, it is like you are guaranteeing that only stuff you manually specify to be in the production code actually makes it in. i know .gitignore is supposed to handle this but it just seems dangerous to rely on source-control related filters when there is really sensitive security info involved. in node i've used grunt & really like that model. The idea being that you have the project run a build then check that into a "build" branch in git & deploy from there. it's also nice because i can uglify etc. if i'm not worried about preserving the source. I guess for distributed coding this is tough because you want your peers to have access to the raw source + build instructions, but if I were working on a really security-sensitive project (I do enterprise so I'm starting to understand the need for extra precautions) I would probably only distribute code that goes through a (perhaps even thin/transparent) build process & then figure out a way to integrate changes back into the source branch. I know it must sound like overkill to the open source world & especially for Rails projects, where there ordinarily is no build stage, but it seems like there is some level of danger in distributing a source control repo where you are relying on you + any collaborators to properly configure .gitignore and never accidentally check anything sensitive into the repo. I am decent with git but no expert, i still sometimes accidentally stage things I shouldn't when initially checking in a .gitignore -- and i have much more faith in myself than some of my peers, hah.
- not_kurt_godel 12y ago
  > The idea being that you have the project run a build then check that into a "build" branch in git & deploy from there. This doesn't at all solve the OP's problem, you shouldn't be putting your build under source control in lieu of your source code.
  - fat0wl 12y ago
    well the way that it works in Grunt is actually that you have your source branch and then there is a separate build branch -- so the source is still versioned, but only the artifacts from the "build" branch are presented to public / pushed to your server, whatever. i just appreciate the security builds add. In enterprise coding the paradigm is very simple -- pretty much keep whatever u want in source, but only built artifacts are ever deployed to the servers. In a closed-source setting this is perfect. I understand what you mean though it doesn't really solve the issue of distributed, open-source development. (I guess no one would really make a public repo unless they wanted to share, huh?)

349 points by DevFactor 12y ago

amluto 12y ago

There really ought to be a way to cap your bill. Alarms aren't enough when large bills can be run up overnight.

PhantomGremlin 12y ago
Yeah, I don't get it. Why doesn't an account automatically come with, let's say, a $100/mo default cap. And also a $25/day default cap. Someone playing around would just leave those defaults alone and thereby not wind up looking like a total fool. Using Wikipedia for a guide, a micro instance only costs $0.013 per hour. An instance with 30 GiB memory and 8 cores only costs $1.00 per hour. So the cap numbers I suggested would work fine for many people. For some reason Amazon allows people to shoot themselves in the foot too easily. Yes, they usually? waive the charges, but it seems like such a waste of resources, overall. It wouldn't be so bad if bitcoin mining were more profitable. But $1000 spent at Amazon probably mines $10 or less in bitcoin. What a waste of energy.
donavanm 12y ago
And what would the action be when that limit is reached? Terminate all your EC2 instances? Delete your objects from S3/Glacier? Destroy all your RDS/DynamoDB/SDB tables? Disable your CloudFront CDN assets? Stop returning DNS answers from Route 53? This blog genre would then be "Amazon deleted all my stuff and ruined my business because they didnt think I'd pay $26". As the story notes they tried to reach out multiple times using multiple contacts. There are also existing tools for setting up specific billing alerts if you really want to take some action at $26.

hox 12y ago

And please for the love of all that is secure, use IAM roles. Even for your personal things. it's not that hard and you can stop things like this from happening even with the auth credentials.

matteotom 12y ago

You can use AWS IAM (https://aws.amazon.com/iam/ https://aws.amazon.com/iam/) to help prevent something like this. AFAIK you can create a sub-account that only has access to specific resources, such as S3, and use the keys from that sub-account. I haven't used it much, but it looks like you can be very specific in what you allow, such as only allowing access to a single bucket with S3, or a single domain with SES.

tekromancr 12y ago
You totally can be very specific about what actions and services an IAM key has access to. The permissions model takes a bit to get your head around (It did me, at least) but once you do, you can have very strict, precise permissions for your keys.
stevekemp 12y ago
Yes that's correct. I use a specific key for only allowing DNS updates to be applied to "example.com" and no other domain, for example. As others have mentioned the billing alerts are also a useful thing, along with the IAM Simulator.

aakilfernandes 12y ago

This seems to be bad design on Amazon's part as well. There should be some kind of manual thresholding in place to make sure this doesn't happen.

hox 12y ago
There is, hence the emails and phone calls that were missed.
- ryanfitz 12y ago
  Amazon also places limits on all of its services. I would think one of the reasons for these default limits is to help with cases of abuse. You can learn more about them at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws_service_limits.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/aws_service_lim...
jerrysievert 12y ago
amazon has limits that take time to increase, which has me scratching my head - we've always had to put in a support ticket whenever moving past those limits, for instance the 50 server limit we reached.

cortesoft 12y ago

Also, if you ever accidentally leak your keys... CHANGE THEM!

riquito 12y ago

> I learned a valuable lesson here though. Don’t trust .gitignores and gems like Firago for keeping your data safe. Open source is awesome, but if you are dealing with anything that can be scaled up to thousands of dollars per hour – at least store it in a private repo if not on your local machine. You learned the wrong thing :-P The lesson here is "always check what you're committing"

jrochkind1 12y ago
That and: Immediately invalidate any auth information that was accidentally published, no matter how briefly. I realize I haven't always followed this advice myself. So the reminder from the OP story is useful.
fein 12y ago
As an additional layer of safety, you can also commit to a local repo, or a private bitbucket repo, and give it all a nice once over before pushing everything to GH. At least this keeps your screw ups out of public scope.
- zo1 12y ago
  Isn't that what you're doing anyways when you use a DCVS? Granted, I use mercurial. It has two components on your side, your working directory, and the actual repo. Committing moves changes from your working directory, and saves them to a branch on your local repo. Then you get the local repo to push that change to a remote one. In essence, "committing" then is the act of pushing your changes to your local repo. Or you could, you know, just look at the changes on disk if really required.
  - coldpie 12y ago
    Yes, that's how Git works. I'm not sure what fein meant.

cheald 12y ago

There are a few lessons here: 1. Use IAM roles. AWS keys should only have access to the specific functionality they need. Best practice is to never use your root credentials for anything; always use IAM users and use unique keys for each use case, so that you can invalidate and replace them easily. Every time documentation or a tutorial asks you to insert AWS keys, your response should be "let me go create a role for that" rather than "let me go look those up". 2. More importantly, if you ever accidentally publish or leak credentials, don't try to clean it up by deleting those commits. Invalidate the credentials immediately and re-issue them. 3. Always, always `git diff HEAD` before committing. Know what you're about to push up. This isn't just a security concern - the number of small, stupid things you'll catch that you'd otherwise end up fixing 15 seconds later is substantial. As a bonus, this incentivizes you to keep your commits small and atomic. You might talk to Amazon directly - they've been known to forgive debts like these in these kinds of circumstances.

pktgen 12y ago
> You might talk to Amazon directly - they've been known to forgive debts like these in these kinds of circumstances. They did: > Lucky for me, I explained my situation to Amazon customer support – and they knew I wasn’t bitcoin mining all night. Amazon was kind enough to drop the charges this time…
- cheald 12y ago
  Whoops. I missed that. Glad the author was able to dodge that bullet!
  - jmiwhite 12y ago
    This was my initial reaction too, but I was pleased to find it's just a slightly misleading title :)
    - pbreit 12y ago
      On HN I recall the title originally including the $2300 (which matched the blog post's title). Now the HN title does not include the $ amount. Did the mods make that change? I would think preserving the source's title would generally take precedence even if a bit misleading.

SwellJoe 12y ago

Hell, even without making the mistake of publishing keys, I've accidentally run up quite large bills for Amazon services; backups that failed to remove old copies was a big one. Instances that were supposed to have been shut down, but for some reason it didn't happen (I don't know if this is my mistake or a bug at Amazon...probably my mistake). I've simply stopped using Amazon for anything tinkery, because the costs of making mistakes can be tremendous. At least when I make mistakes on my own colocated server, I know it can never cost me more than the $100/month I pay to host it. And, storage is practically infinite (4TB hard disks), and I can spin up more VMs than I would ever need for tinkering in 32GB of RAM on our "spare" server. And, when I have needed to use VM with some cloud host...Linode and Digital Ocean and similar may have dramatically smaller toolsets for managing virtual resources than Amazon (probably unworkably so for large deployments), but my mind has a much easier time predicting costs than with Amazon. After being surprised on more than one occasion with a ~$300 bill from Amazon (for running nothing but personal pet projects with no economic return), I turned everything off.

mhink 12y ago
Something similar has happened to me, on a smaller scale. I was recently checking my bank account, and noticed a charge from AWS for something like $15. After further investigation, I had apparently been charged this $15 for about 6 months. Hmm. Logging into AWS and checking the Cost Explorer showed that I had been charged for a t1.small EC2 instance I had running, but when I logged into the AWS console, all I saw was a single "stopped" instance. There's no way I was being charged for cycles I'm not using, right? Turns out that the instance I was being charged for was in us-west, and I had only been looking at us-east- and there is no indication within the actual EC2 panel that you have instances in other regions! I was a bit perturbed, to say the least...
- fletchowns 12y ago
  Not sure why you didn't click on "Billing & Cost Management" where you can see a complete breakdown (by resource and region) of exactly what you are being charged for.

mylons 12y ago

mildly sensational conclusion. his real lesson should be "this is how i learned how to use github."

freeall 12y ago
Agreed. But the discussion here on Github is pretty good and tells us that it's happened to quite a lot of people. So the headline might be a bit sensational, but it's a real problem.
- mylons 12y ago
  definitely. but he's blaming it on learning rails in a way. this is coming from someone who did this at one of their jobs. i accidentally committed AWS keys, and we had dozens of servers launched on our account in minutes. was insane.

moe 12y ago

Lesson 1: Don't publish your passwords. Lesson 2: When using AWS then use Billing Alarms[1]. It takes about 1 minute to setup and enables e-mail or SMS notifications at dollar-thresholds of your choice. [1] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/create-billing-alarm.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/...

FireBeyond 12y ago
The corollary to that is the first thing such people/scripts do when they have access to your account is disable Billing Alarms.
- rifung 12y ago
  Are you sure you can disable billing alarms with just your access/secret key? I thought you would need to know the user name + password for that
  - TheDong 12y ago
    Having root credentials is sufficient, and based on the fact that this guy said "apparently the s3 api lets you spin up ec2 instances" it looks like he didn't touch IAM. Root credentials are deprecated, but can still be used and if this guy used them then yes, his billing alarms could have been disabled. There's a difference between an admin iam user (can't do billing stuff) and the root credentials (just as powerful as username / password).
- mkale 12y ago
  Maybe they should send an email/SMS to notify you that email/SMS had been disabled. (And, an email/SMS to the old address when the email/SMS is changed too.)

mattkrea 12y ago

There seems to be some serious confusion here if this dev thinks you can spin up EC2 instances with the S3 API. Perhaps one lesson here aside from keeping keys outside of public repositories is to learn how an API works (IAM, arns, etc) before using it.

lxe 12y ago

> Actually hooking into the API was very straightforwards, and didn’t take more than an hour to set up. I have learned that if this is the case, I'm doing something wrong with my AWS setup.

hyperliner 12y ago
Yours is a great observation! With great power comes great responsibility. If you find that you got great power but don't feel you got great responsibility, then chances are you are doing it wrong.

smsm42 12y ago

If the criminals can create a bot to scan for AWS keys, I wonder if github can't create a plugin to detect the same and warn the committer or maybe limit access to this data to original committer only. It won't be 100% but I bet the bots aren't 100% either, so if it covers most of the cases it would still be useful. Or maybe just have a script on local github pre-commit hook?

fletchowns 12y ago
I don't think it's github's responsibility to prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot.
- smsm42 12y ago
  It's not an obligation, but neither is running a free git repository :) It would be a nice help though. One that can save some people $2k - not many software features have this kind of immediate impact :)
- slapresta 12y ago
  Well, no, but it would be a nice-to-have.
- hamburglar 12y ago
  Nobody said it was their responsibility. If adding an optional feature that prevents you from shooting yourself in the foot makes people like github more, maybe it's worth it to them. "Responsibility" has nothing to do with it.
  - balls187 12y ago
    Would have to make it an option, because we check in various AWS keys into private repos. Also how do you differentiate an AWS root key (bad) vs an IAM Key (good)?
    - mod 12y ago
      Maybe you should rethink your policy either way. In my circles, at least, it's standard practice to use environment variables. But I would think clearly it'd be an option.

jorgecastillo 12y ago

Damn! I know one thing for sure after reading this, I am not even trying AWS until I really really know what I am doing. For now I'll stick with VirtualBox and DigitalOcean.

coralreef 12y ago

Is it not possible to setup some sort of dollar value or bandwidth maximum and freeze the account upon reaching that value?

DevFactor 12y ago
I wish! $100/mo cap would save a lot of these accounts from being hacked. My mistake was not unique, and if you browse around on Google you will find other authors who have had the same issues.
nni 12y ago
For Amazon it is certainly possible, imo. They just don't do it, AFAIK. An alert that you might or might not get is obviously not as reliable as a hard limit.

CJefferson 12y ago

Is there an easy way of putting a strict limit on the amount of money I'm willing to spend on AWS?

eastbayjake 12y ago
I haven't seen anything about limits, but they do let you set alerts when you pass a user-specified spending threshold.

zatkin 12y ago

I used some app to upload a 250GB archive to Amazon Glacier. Turns out the app was having difficulties uploading it all at once, and its queue functionality sucked. I explained this to Amazon, since they were suggesting that I use that app to begin with. Turns out I ended up using terabytes of data usage just getting everything up to Glacier because the app was faulty. They tried to bill me something like $1500, but I never paid for it and just had my data removed immediately.

zatkin 12y ago

nadams 12y ago

I think a lot of the comments here are good - but a thing to keep in mind with github is that their free repo hosting is by default - public. Which means that your code is indexed and searchable - by anyone visiting github including anonymous users. They do give you free private repos if you are a college student or professor. I am a big advocate of self hosting - not because services like github suck (in fact I'm a big fan of github, bitbucket and other services) but you have more control over your own code (that and you can setup private repos). Here is a small list of self hosted solutions (I forked indefero into srchub - many don't like the google code feel but I personally like it for the simplicity and the fact I can easily fix/modify/add on to it): http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/3506/self-hosted-replacements-for-mercurial http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/3506/self-ho...

fragmede 12y ago
FYI, bitbucket and possibly other services offer private repos for free (in order to compete with GitHub).
- nadams 12y ago
  tl;dr; free services are fine - just make sure you have backups of all your data For most individual projects - they are probably good enough. However, the thing to keep in mind is that for free they usually limit features (I think bitbucket limits the number of developers) or remove features all together (google code removing downloads support, github did at one time but reintroduced it). I'm not saying that I think they should be offering everything for free and shouldn't take away features - they have to make money - but in my opinion always have backups and a plan B in case you need to jump ship. I was a huge google code fan (the design isn't Web 2.0 with social integrations - but I prefer functional over design) until they pulled the plug on downloads support (which for most Linux people isn't a big problem - a make && make install and it's compiled AND installed - for Windows it's not that easy). Which forced me to self host - I do mirror many of my public projects on github but in the event github management decides to remove/reduce a feature I won't be struggling to find a new "home" for my ~100+ projects. Also - if you look at the issue tracker for google code it's pretty obvious that Google is no longer supporting or even monitoring it (several spam issues have been appearing). I don't have a crystal ball - but my best guess is that Google will pull the plug on Google Code as well. And it would make sense - most people have already "fled" Google Code for github/bitbucket etc. With that said - let me put on my tin foil hat and say that even if we ignore any potential future issues there could be potential privacy issues if you upload your code to a private repo hosted by someone else. I'm personally not the type to snoop, but that might not stop some lowly intern from getting curious. Or even some bug on their site that makes private repos public (for a short time anyways). Did you hear about the time that Dropbox made passwords optional for four hours [1]? [1] - http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/20/dropbox-security-bug-made-passwords-optional-for-four-hours/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/20/dropbox-security-bug-made-p...

jakejake 12y ago

I'm not at all surprised to learn of bots cruising github looking for keys. I think a good lesson is that if you ever accidentally expose your API key - revoke or delete them immediately and generate new key.

je42 12y ago

mmmh. Using s3 key/secret to launch ec2 instances ? Does anybody have the pointer to the docs for that ?

fletchowns 12y ago
They were probably using their root credentials instead of creating a narrowly focused IAM profile.
je42 12y ago
found it. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSecurityCredentials/1.0/AboutAWSCredentials.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSecurityCredentials/1.0/AboutA...
- je42 12y ago
  mmh. i think the author mentioned this as well: weren't these in the past just for S3 ?

iancarroll 12y ago

I've said this before, but AWS billing support is usually quite sympathetic to your situation if you've made a mistake. They've dropped $120 in spot instance charges I had which went way over what I expected.

alinenache 12y ago

Buyers in a perfect world

alinenache 12y ago

Buyers in a perfect world http://waltherpragerandphilosophy1.blogspot.com/2014/12/buyers-in-perfect-world.html http://waltherpragerandphilosophy1.blogspot.com/2014/12/buye...

driverdan 12y ago

I'm surprised no one else mentioned the Heroku mistake of putting config in a file instead of an environment variables. Settings like API keys should always be in env vars on Heroku, not in a config file.

theGimp 12y ago
If I understand you correctly, Heroku does make that possible. You can use Heroku Toolbelt or their web dashboard to add environment variables. Adding environment variables to a file is just a convenience.

projectramo 12y ago

The same thing happened to me. Almost exactly. Rails again. S3 bucket for images. Following along with 1monthrails this time. Pushed the key, fell asleep, awoke to Amazon warnings and a $2000+ bill. Also removed. I wonder how often this happens. Are they mining bitcoins?

projectramo 12y ago
I now use bitbucket.
Buge 12y ago
It would be really stupid to mine bitcoins. I assume they were mining litecoins or some other more GPU/CPU friendly coin.
- jmnicolas 12y ago
  Why ? It's slow but it cost them nothing ...
  - Buge 12y ago
    Because they can make money much faster with litecoin. To illustrate this, EC2 GPU instances have a NVIDIA Kepler GK104 with 1536 cores, so that is like the GTX680. It gets 120 MHash/s on bitcoin, which translates to 2 cents per month. It gets 207 kHash/s on litecoin, which translates to 32 cents per month. I think on vertcoin you could get 90 cents per month.
    - jmnicolas 12y ago
      Wow the effectiveness of GPU for mining Bitcoin has dropped dramatically since last time I looked at it (admittedly a couple years ago). If I remember well you could make a few hundred bucks a month with just one high end ATI graphic card.
DevFactor 12y ago
Amazon support told me (at least the ones spun up on my account), where indeed bit-coin miners.

ljk 12y ago

>Over the holidays, I opted to try to teach myself Ruby & it’s companion Rails. shouldn't it be "its"?

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- Gigablah 12y ago
  Don't need an English major for that :)

jedberg 12y ago

Amazon has been really proactive in protecting against these kinds of things. They seem to be searching the web constantly for API keys, because they'll send you emails that say "hey we found your key here, you better do something about that".

kephra 12y ago

The expensive mistake was to use Amazon at all. An own domain name costs about $1/month, an OVH root server less then $10. Install a minimal Debian and Linux Containers on it, and expand your own cloud, if you need it, e.g. by extending with cheap Hetzner servers.

vertis 12y ago
Regardless of what service (AWS, Linode, Rackspace, OVH) if you leak keys or passwords you have the potential for costs incurred by malicious users. I have not used OVH, but a quick perusal of the OVH API[1] suggests that you could invoke plenty of commands that would incur costs. [1] https://api.ovh.com/console/#/order https://api.ovh.com/console/#/order
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  But your app would not have any keys. You would give it a server and that would be it. There's no API use in a toy project, and so no way to leak account authentication.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Xorlev 12y ago

I thought new AWS accounts came by default with a 20 instance limit...

theGimp 12y ago
They do, but the bigger instances cost a lot to rent.
t0mas88 12y ago
Yes, but 20x the largest instance option is expensive. The limits at Rackspace Cloud are a bit more sane, they limit the total "size" instead of number of instances. So you can run many small ones without hitting the default limit, but not as many large (expensive) ones.
- Xorlev 12y ago
  The author just mentioned that there were 140 servers in his account. I do know how expensive the servers can be.

plasma 12y ago

Maybe Github can reject commits by default that contain phrases of magic keys/known strings and file combinations that contain passphrases.

logn 12y ago
I'd rather Github not become the Gmail of version control.
- jagger27 12y ago
  Github is already the Gmail of version control. Isn't this the reason the attack is possible? Every file is automatically indexed for search.
  - logn 12y ago
    Yes. However I meant that I don't want Github to start developing features that involves scanning and applying AI to codebases and their users' behavior, because I think it's a temptation they start marketing that data. E.g., "Buy our engineer intelligence subscription! Find out if your job applicant is a ninja or noob!" I suppose there's an argument that the data is already public and anyone could apply that analysis, which is true. But the difference is that Github is not profiting from this; their feature development will continue to focus on private repo owners as their customers (whose interests are pretty much aligned with public repo owners).

lexalizer 12y ago

This happens very often. Like many others have recommended, disable the global AWS keys and use roles.

vertis 12y ago

I documented a similar experience just over a year ago[1]. I ended up helping give a talk about my experience at the Amazon Summit in Sydney. I hope I made a good cautionary tale to the devs/ops/managers attending. [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911908

bigsassy 12y ago

The same thing happened to my brother. He's been teaching himself software development for a while, and learned the same painful lesson about securing your keys. This was despite the things he did right, like: 1. Used IAM roles (but he didn't lock down it's permissions nearly enough clearly) 2. Used two factor authentication. http://snaketrials.com/2014/11/11/espionage/ http://snaketrials.com/2014/11/11/espionage/ http://snaketrials.com/2014/11/12/espionage-update/ http://snaketrials.com/2014/11/12/espionage-update/ I should note Amazon forgave the money his account owed, given it was his first time making this mistake on their systems. Amazon told him the servers were probably being used to mine bitcoins. edit - Oh, and on his blog he says it was $2000 over 12 hours. It turned out to be $5000 over 2 hours!

ams6110 12y ago

Had a very similar thing happen to a co-worker... accidentally pushed an AWS key to github, and over $7,500 in charges before it was noticed. Fortunately it was forgiven.

mc_hammer 12y ago

Why do people use this? for $3000 you can run like 6 4ghz machines with 12 gb ram out of your house with like 10mbs up and 50mbs down. I seriously believe the % of customers of amazon computing that actually need it is like 1%.

shortstuffsushi 12y ago
Why do people use Amazon? A number of reasons. Do I want to buy and manage servers myself? Would I pay for an additional computer to host my little toy Rails app? Will my ISP allow me to route network traffic to my personal IP with a standard plan? Most, at least that I've seen, prevent you from hosting. For a little project something like the author of this article described, using virtual hosting is significantly easier (and more realistic). If you're going to run an enterprise operation, bringing that sort of hardware in house might make sense, but a lot of larger companies are still pushing that hosting out to places like Amazon as well. Now, if you're asking why Amazon would allow (new) customers to scale up to $3000 worth of hosting overnight, maybe that's a separate issue. But how should Amazon judge that? There are probably users who want to jump straight up to that sort of scale. And evidently they did detect that the author didn't seem to fit that use case -- they actually called him about it pretty much right away.

theGimp 12y ago

In addition to the steps mentioned above, one thing that has kept me safe from my own heedlessness is to never, ever store credentials in a source code tree. If your project is reading credentials from a file, rewrite it so it reads them from environment variables. Most IDEs make it very easy to do that, and Python's virtual environments can do that work for you. Yes, it takes more effort, and sometimes it will be a little convoluted[1]. However, it's well worth the effort as you will have a system that you can put your faith in rather than having to double check every time in order to make sure you're not about to inadvertently commit your API keys. [1] Example of my own: Pycharm does not read variables stored in a virtual environment's configuration, so I have to set them twice.

i386 12y ago

Always put your API keys in an environment variable or ~/.

hisyam 12y ago

> Unfortunately the Rails tutorial is pretty bland so about half way through I decided to snoop around to see what my options where. Somehow, almost by chance I ended up a subscriber on Lynda. Lynda only has one Rails tutorial, but its pretty in depth and is backed by a five hour Ruby tutorial. I had the situation in reverse. I found the Lynda.com rails tutorials first (in 2011) and I found it lacking compared to Rails Tutorial. I'm not sure what's the situation now, from Lynda.com website it seems the author (Kevin Skoglund) has updated the tutorials for Rails 4.

mdnormy 12y ago

PSA If you're running AWS, I highly recommend for all developers and sysadmin to attend AWS free training[0][1]. While you're at it might as well get yourself certified[2]. You might have senior expertise with system operation and application deployment but sometimes, AWS approach things differently. The essence of the training is to always implement best practices, not just solving problem. Also use the opportunity of AWS event to network with their Solution Architect. Trust me on this one. This worth more than AWS Enterprise Support. [0] http://aws.amazon.com/training/course-descriptions/architect/ http://aws.amazon.com/training/course-descriptions/architect... [1] http://aws.amazon.com/training/course-descriptions/architecting-advanced/ http://aws.amazon.com/training/course-descriptions/architect... [2] http://aws.amazon.com/certification/ http://aws.amazon.com/certification/

pen2l 12y ago
Erm, is it really free? I just followed your link, which lead me to https://www.aws.training/home?courseid=3&language=en-us&source=web_en_course-descriptions_architect https://www.aws.training/home?courseid=3&language=en-us&sour... ... which lead me to http://www.globalknowledge.com/training/course.asp?pageid=9&courseid=24526&country=United+States http://www.globalknowledge.com/training/course.asp?pageid=9&... ... and there I find out it's $2095 USD. Hopefully I'm mistaken... because I'd love to take it if it's free!
- mdnormy 12y ago
  I just noticed that free training session seems to be limited to certain location sold by "Amazon Web Services". For example Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok are free, but other location have varying fees. I attended 2 free session in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore back in June. I always assume its free for all. Sorry
  - astine 12y ago
    Huh, a round trip to Kuala Lumpur is less than the course in the States.[1] Best excuse for an overseas flight I've seen lately. https://www.hipmunk.com/flights/WAS-to-KUL#!dates=Jan12,Jan14&pax=1 https://www.hipmunk.com/flights/WAS-to-KUL#!dates=Jan12,Jan1...

fragmede 12y ago

The github help page* literally states "Danger.. If you committed a key, generate a new one." In a box. In Red. I'm not sure how much clearer GitHub could make that. *https://help.github.com/articles/remove-sensitive-data/ https://help.github.com/articles/remove-sensitive-data/

mikeryan 12y ago
I use github every day. I've never read nor seen that page.

bbcbasic 12y ago

I wonder how much crypto they mined? Probably $1 worth but still worth it for them!

logicallee 12y ago

why doesn't Amazon just ask you on sign-up if you're going to be mining coins, and if you say no, require specific authorization from you (outside of the usual key) to start doing so? Then until you authorize it, they can just not run mining instances on your behalf. surely it's easy for them to tell when this is being done? EDIT: this got downvoted, but I stand by it, plus it's a question, so you could reply and answer it. In my thinking it's the same reason there's a daily ATM withdrawal limit set by default. You can lift it, but it's there to reduce incentive (payoff from trying to see your PIN and then stealing your ATM card.) the current policy is like the bank calling you and saying, "ummm, I hope you know you've already withdrawn $7,000 and seem to be continuing." Given that bitcoin is (literally) cash, it seems to me saner to not run bitcoin mining instances by default, unless you authorize it specifically. or can they not tell?

cthalupa 12y ago
Bitcoin mining is not a service offered on AWS - they are spawning up EC2 instances, which are virtual machines you have root access to. From there you can mine bitcoins or do whatever else you want. Amazon doesn't have access to the data on the instance, or a list of processes running inside of it, or similar.
- logicallee 12y ago
  I know, but even without root isn't it trivial for Amazon to unambiguously tell that this is what the VM's are doing, without looking at anything else on the instances? How can you run virtual machine instances without knowing what the CPU's and GPU's are doing? (There is no mathematical 'private computing' or secret computing over untrusted hardware, i.e. hardware run by other people, that is used in practice anywhere in the world, where for fancy mathematical reasons the operator has no idea what the CPU or GPU of the instance they're running for someone is actually computing. It's not even a cryptographic primitive people know about, and certainly not something performed by hypervisors.) The CPU or GPU pattern of bitcoin mining must be completely unambiguous and trivial for Amazon to detect on EC2 instances. Or am I wrong for some reason?

dilap 12y ago

Yeah, I did that, though in my case it was a bitbucket repo I thought was private, but somehow ended up public (obviously stupid to ever be checking in the keys at all). All I had setup was a micro S3 instance I'd been using for some toy craigslist scraping & hadn't touched for months. Then out of the blue I get an "urgent please check your account" email from amazon. Go check the AWS console, and what do you know -- maximum number of maxed-out instances instances churning away with 100% CPU usage in every region on earth. The charges were already about to $50,000 when I turned everything off. I wrote a very, very apologetic email to amazon, and they forgave all the charges, for which I was very grateful. Definitely a learning experience.

Illniyar 12y ago

"Turns out through the S3 API you can actually spin up EC2 instances" Can you really use the S3 API to spin up EC2 instances? or is the guy just mixing the fact that the credentials he used for S3 can be used for other AWS APIs ?

mdnormy 12y ago
> Can you really use the S3 API to spin up EC2 instances? No. My guess would be credential with allow:* service access.

wazoox 12y ago

I must be very old or very paranoid, but I wouldn't for one second think of developing from scratch using only public infrastructure. If I want to learn rail, I'd start by installing it and running it on my local PC. What's the point of relying on heroku, aws, etc for just everything? What's the point of using github as the main hub for everything? I'm synchronizing stuff to github explicitly and carefully, my casual, day-to-day operations are all running on my own hardware, network and services. Even my most simple websites run first at home, then are sync'ed to the web after I've checked everything works fine.

fat0wl 12y ago

Some old man Java rambling for you. :) (I am ex-Rails actually) one of the big things about Java that at first I thought was tedious but now have come to love is the build process. By creating the "built" project in a new folder, it is like you are guaranteeing that only stuff you manually specify to be in the production code actually makes it in. i know .gitignore is supposed to handle this but it just seems dangerous to rely on source-control related filters when there is really sensitive security info involved. in node i've used grunt & really like that model. The idea being that you have the project run a build then check that into a "build" branch in git & deploy from there. it's also nice because i can uglify etc. if i'm not worried about preserving the source. I guess for distributed coding this is tough because you want your peers to have access to the raw source + build instructions, but if I were working on a really security-sensitive project (I do enterprise so I'm starting to understand the need for extra precautions) I would probably only distribute code that goes through a (perhaps even thin/transparent) build process & then figure out a way to integrate changes back into the source branch. I know it must sound like overkill to the open source world & especially for Rails projects, where there ordinarily is no build stage, but it seems like there is some level of danger in distributing a source control repo where you are relying on you + any collaborators to properly configure .gitignore and never accidentally check anything sensitive into the repo. I am decent with git but no expert, i still sometimes accidentally stage things I shouldn't when initially checking in a .gitignore -- and i have much more faith in myself than some of my peers, hah.

not_kurt_godel 12y ago
> The idea being that you have the project run a build then check that into a "build" branch in git & deploy from there. This doesn't at all solve the OP's problem, you shouldn't be putting your build under source control in lieu of your source code.
- fat0wl 12y ago
  well the way that it works in Grunt is actually that you have your source branch and then there is a separate build branch -- so the source is still versioned, but only the artifacts from the "build" branch are presented to public / pushed to your server, whatever. i just appreciate the security builds add. In enterprise coding the paradigm is very simple -- pretty much keep whatever u want in source, but only built artifacts are ever deployed to the servers. In a closed-source setting this is perfect. I understand what you mean though it doesn't really solve the issue of distributed, open-source development. (I guess no one would really make a public repo unless they wanted to share, huh?)