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Still locked out of my AWS account

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Re: Still locked out of my AWS account

#51

Post by MichaelGG »

willow9886 wrote: post #29
digi_owl wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything this, along with similar situation(s?) with Google, should stand as a strong warning against single sign on systems across multiple services with multiple TOS.

Why do you see this as a single sign-on issue? Seems to me the issue is over reliance on large SaaS providers. Same things happens all the time to Google users.

Because you're unlikey to trigger a violation on your cloud SaaS account, but could easily run afoul of other policies like "Real Name" or "Bought a Pixel Phone and Sold It" or posting something "offensive", getting reported by other users, etc.

If the account is just for a cloud SaaS, then there's likely to be very few policies to disable your account.

Re: Still locked out of my AWS account

#52

Post by sly010 »

legohead wrote: post #43
joelrunyon wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened to me with instagram. I reset a password, then they detected "suspicious activity." I clicked "send pin via email" and the email never shows up. I've done it 3 or 4 times over the course of a week + it never works. It's a documented error + FB/Instagram refuse to addres it. https://medium.com/@joelrunyon/instagrams-security-features-...

And a similar thing has happened to me with Microsoft. I needed to get to my OneDrive. I go to log in, and it says invalid password. I go to reset the password, and it never sends me an email. I go through the alternate-email update process, answer the security questions, and it doesn't believe I am who I am. When I try to get access to real support (a person), it makes me login. Back to problem #1. Also, I should no…

Same here (email never arrived) with my Apple Developer Account.

Re: Still locked out of my AWS account

#53

Post by willow9886 »

mintplant wrote: post #47
willow9886 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you see this as a single sign-on issue? Seems to me the issue is over reliance on large SaaS providers. Same things happens all the time to Google users.

Because if you lose that single sign-on account, you lose everything attached to it as well.

Amazon offers many services, of course they are going to want users to have one set of credentials to access all those services.

There are trade-offs to every security approach, but storing passwords at every web service is 100x worse.

Re: Still locked out of my AWS account

#54

Post by mintplant »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #30
tjoff wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they can - but that is yet another reason to rather rely on multiple gmail accounts if the alternative is a single gmail account.

If you use a single gmail account, it seems far less likely to get banned. I think I was caught in some sort of automatic purge, since I certainly wasn't abusing anything or using it for much beyond my side projects. This email hostage situation kind of sucks. Hopefully there's an alternative for scenarios like this. Someone mentioned self-hosting upthread. I wonder how difficult that is.

I have numerous Gmail accounts (more than 20) and not a single one has been banned. And Google explicitly supports using multiple accounts by providing an account switcher. Perhaps your account was banned for some reason other than being a duplicate.

Re: Still locked out of my AWS account

#55

Post by jimktrains2 »

gorkonsine wrote: post #4

This should be a good warning about what you can expect when relying on other companies for service.

At some level you're always relying on other companies for a service. Even Google does -- they don't own the last mile.

However, even if you expect people to CoLo, you're still relying on a the facility for power, cooling, networking, security. Moreover, AWS is a paid service, there should be some expectation of conflict resolution. It's not like Google where Gmail is free and there really isn't any reason you should be able to reach out to someone.

What you should be arguing is not that we shouldn't rely on a _single_ provider. Redundancy is fairly cheap in terms of material, even if a little time-capital expensive to set up.

Re: Still locked out of my AWS account

#56

Post by drbawb »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #13
iddqd wrote: post #9

Might sound obvious in hindsight, but _always_ create separate AWS accounts for your different projects.

Doesn't this require separate gmail addresses? If so, then that's an extremely bad idea. I already had one gmail account completely banned with no notice. I wasn't doing anything abusive -- I used it for some npm projects and a github account. Actually, is there a reasonable free gmail alternative for situations like this? I'd like to migrate. FastMail is worth paying for, but it's too expensive for one-off side proj…

One trick I like is that you can use `account+@example.com` and a lot of services will consider it a separate e-mail address, even though MTAs will transfer it to the same account; this has the added benefit of being easy to filter for on your e-mail client. I also use this tactic when signing up for web services that I anticipate will spam me. (I import a lot of merch from China/Japan; their unsubscribe systems tend to be insanely broken / borderline user hostile. Each such account gets a unique tag so that I know which service is spamming me.)

Alternatively if you want ultimate trust just run your own mailserver and set up as many aliases as you want! For $5/mo you can get a Linode box to do it, and I've yet to get an IP from them that is on an e-mail blacklist. They have great documentation[1], the most important thing is to just make sure your SMTP server requires authentication & refuses to relay for remote hosts. SPF/DKIM are necessary to get past modern spam filters, but frankly if you've ever setup a TLS cert you can probably manage to setup DKIM just fine.

[1]: https://www.linode.com/docs/email/postfix/

Re: Still locked out of my AWS account

#57

Post by willow9886 »

MichaelGG wrote: post #51
willow9886 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you see this as a single sign-on issue? Seems to me the issue is over reliance on large SaaS providers. Same things happens all the time to Google users.

Because you're unlikey to trigger a violation on your cloud SaaS account, but could easily run afoul of other policies like "Real Name" or "Bought a Pixel Phone and Sold It" or posting something "offensive", getting reported by other users, etc. If the account is just for a cloud SaaS, then there's likely to be very few policies to disable your account.

But then you're storing passwords in more services, which creates more surface area for breaches.

If you shop with Amazon, host your services with Amazon, watch TV on Amazon...there's simply no way of getting around the fact that Amazon will only want to manage a password for you in one place. The issue is clearly over reliance on Amazon services.

Re: Still locked out of my AWS account

#58

Post by mistermann »

luckystarr wrote: post #34

Send an email to jeff@amazon.com Jeff Bezos himself said if you are having problems you should mail him directly. Behind this address there is a full team investigating the issue and if it's something they want to handle will actually lead to improvements for all customers.

I think if Jeff actually cared he would have put some personnel in place to back up "Your feedback is helping us build Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company".

It's odd though, in my experience customer support on Amazon is amazingly good.

Re: Still locked out of my AWS account

#59

Post by ikeboy »

I've had the same issue with buying and selling accounts - my buying account got locked out, which prevented me from logging in to my selling account, with 50 pending orders at the time. Luckily I emailed jeff@amazon.com and got my main account unlocked within 2 days and my buying eventually got back a week or two later.

Seems like they still haven't fixed the underlying issue of bots locking accounts across services.

Re: Still locked out of my AWS account

#60

Post by dlb_ »

wvenable wrote: post #32
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't this require separate gmail addresses? If so, then that's an extremely bad idea. I already had one gmail account completely banned with no notice. I wasn't doing anything abusive -- I used it for some npm projects and a github account. Actually, is there a reasonable free gmail alternative for situations like this? I'd like to migrate. FastMail is worth paying for, but it's too expensive for one-off side proj…

Sometimes I feel like I'm last person on the planet who has their own domain and hosts their own email.

You're certainly not the only person, I do the same. These stories that keep popping up, about people losing access to their SSO accounts and emails convinced me that it's worth the effort.
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