AWS is both, curse and blessing. It helps deploying services fast, reliable and without many configurations efforts. But there are some things on which you can easily stumble. Setting wrong access permissions is one, leaving (AWS) credentials open is another. Both I’ve discovered in an AWS bucket of a market leading SEO company which enabled me to access a huge load of recruitment data like CVs, resumes and so on.
Within the bucket there was a file including “credentials” in the filename. Guess what was inside? AWS keys 😀
Anything else? Yeah… logs, backups, db-configs, db-dumps. Mostly all you need if you wanna harm a company. But well, as you all know, I’m not the bad guy and so the work has just began. It took me about one day of tail, grep, find and googling through the data to find out who is the owner of the bucket. Finally, in one of the backups I found a config file in a (of course hidden) .git directory containing an email address:
To my surprise that was kind a “hole in one”, the contact was the CEO of the affected company and even better, he was replying to my email and had an open ear for my information. This made it very easy getting the problem fixed in a timely manner 🙂
Reward? Well, nothing but an honest and warm “Thank you” which is okay to me :o)
Mission accomplished, Web safer!