Why is it possible to destroy an entire enterprise by compromising an Amazon acc...

TkTech · on June 18, 2014

Amazon has extremely tight security, including 2fa, fine-grained IAM permissions, instance security groups, VPC, and more.

The fact that Code Space's didn't bother to use them is their own problem, not a failing on Amazon's side.

Additionally, storing all of your backups with the same service as your production environment was outright moronic.

lelf · on June 18, 2014

> Amazon's infrastructure seems to be built without essential safeguards

Their amazon's infrastructure

theatrus2 · on June 18, 2014

Amazon AWS has 2FA, clearly not used (unless it actually was an inside job).

As for the cooling off period, I'm not sure. Perhaps you can get the contents back, but it may be cost prohibitive.

stevekemp · on June 20, 2014

Amazon does have a remarkably fine-grained control mechanism - but you need to use it.

For example I never publish my Route53 (DNS hosting service) keys, but even if they were leaked the account is only setup on the Amazon side to work from a single source IP.

You can restrict permissions significantly, so again in my case I've got a user configured who can only add/delete DNS records - but cannot create a new zone, or delete other zones. Not ideal, since "remove all records" is almost the same as "delete zone" in practice, but I'm not worried that unrelated zones on that account will be broken if I do lose my keys.