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There was that time in 2013, that I leaked my AWS key and a "hacker" ran up a $3500 bill running Litecoin mining[0]. Not only was the support excellent and forg
by vertis 3y ago
There was that time in 2013, that I leaked my AWS key and a "hacker" ran up a $3500 bill running Litecoin mining[0]. Not only was the support excellent and forgave the debt, Werner Vogel (AWS CTO) popped into the HN thread[1] and offered to help -- I got to email him and tell him his people were already on top of it.
And yes, they have made their money back off me in the 10 years since (average $100-200 a month).
[0]: https://vertis.io/2013/12/16/unauthorised-litecoin-mining/ https://vertis.io/2013/12/16/unauthorised-litecoin-mining/
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6911908
- e40 3y agoExact same thing happened to me but the bill was $11000.
- vertis 3y agoOuch, yeah it became really common, and I know of ex-colleagues that had the same problem.
- BobaFloutist 3y agoWould you mind sharing how (in broad terms) your key got leaked? I'm always interested in stories like that as a point of comparison to my own (not great) security practices just so I know how reasonable I'm being.
- vertis 3y agoIt was a GitHub repo that I made public that I didn't realise had a key in it. And yes,it's bad practice putting the keys in code to begin with, and I knew better.
- BobaFloutist 3y agoHappens to the best of us Thanks for being willing to share, openness about "stupid" mistakes helps everyone else avoid them.
- vertis 3y agoBiggest lesson is to setup billing alerts for any service like that. Put it 20% above normal usage and then you'll get a fairly immediate warning. Won't save some of it if you're sleeping, but can definitely reduce the time someone has to run up bills.