Slashdot Mirror
Bots Scanning GitHub To Steal Amazon EC2 Keys
New submitter juniq writes: As one developer found out, posting your Amazon keys to GitHub on accident can be a costly mistake if they are not revoked immediately.
"When I woke up the next morning, I had four emails from Amazon AWS and a missed phone call from Amazon AWS. Something about 140 servers running on my AWS account. What? How? I only had S3 keys on my GitHub and they where gone within 5 minutes! Turns out through the S3 API you can actually spin up EC2 instances, and my key had been spotted by a bot that continually searches GitHub for API keys. Amazon AWS customer support informed me this happens a lot recently; hackers have created an algorithm that searches GitHub 24 hours per day for API keys. Once it finds one it spins up max instances of EC2 servers to farm itself bitcoins."
"When I woke up the next morning, I had four emails from Amazon AWS and a missed phone call from Amazon AWS. Something about 140 servers running on my AWS account. What? How? I only had S3 keys on my GitHub and they where gone within 5 minutes! Turns out through the S3 API you can actually spin up EC2 instances, and my key had been spotted by a bot that continually searches GitHub for API keys. Amazon AWS customer support informed me this happens a lot recently; hackers have created an algorithm that searches GitHub 24 hours per day for API keys. Once it finds one it spins up max instances of EC2 servers to farm itself bitcoins."
AWS strongly discourages the uses of root API keys, as they give bad guys who find them the "keys to the kingdom". Why should the credentials for one's S3 account also work for creating EC2 instances?
Amazon provides extensive control over access credentials through IAM, so one can create (for example) an S3-specific user with limited privileges and generate API keys for that user. If they get compromised, the bad guy has limited access: they might be able to add new files to S3, which is bad, but it's less bad than them spinning up hundreds of servers for nefarious purposes, deleting all your files, etc.
Judicious user of IAM can also reduce user errors: I use Amazon Glacier for backing up certain critical files (e.g. wedding photos, baby photos, copies of wills, passports, etc.). I created an "upload, view, and restore/download" user for Glacier that explicitly does not have the "delete" permission enabled. I have a second IAM user with "view and delete" permissions. API keys for both users are stored in FastGlacier, with the "delete" user credentials stored encrypted so I need to enter a password to switch to that user. The user without delete permissions is the default user and the credentials are not stored with a password. This way I can do the standard backup/restore functions needed while working with backups but significantly reduce the possibility of my accidentally deleting backed-up files if I fat-finger the wrong key.
...nor are algorithms usually created. Algorithms are discovered, devised, or designed. Software is created. Bots are created. Algorithms exist independent of their discovery.
Anyway, I'm getting sick of hearing the word "algorithms" used as it seems to be in the movies a lot lately.
I guess i am too old to understand how loose people treat the internet these days. 'I posted my credentials openly on the internet and am now shocked that I have been taken advatage of'... no way! You shared the keys to your kingdom and someone abused it?? Shocking.
As a complete side note: I hate when people like the author don't know the difference between 'where' and 'were'....fuck, no wonder he was easy fodder