For me a company of their size and, what I would expect, maturity, this new announcement does not satisfy me or provide me much assurance. Consequently I am still happy I have been recommending people against Ubiquiti since the original announcement from Krebs.
* Why was it so easy for a lead engineer to get access to a root AWS user without anyone else being notified? I.e. AWS GuardDuty provides FREE alerting for when an AWS root IAM account is logged in or used, this account should be under lock and key and when used, confirmed and audited by relevant persons or teams.
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* Furthermore on the root account being easily accessed, the root account in the companies I've worked at had MFA enabled, and the QR code is locked in a safe only accessible by two people agreeing it needs to be accessed in a break glass situation, where warranted.
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* Why was he also able to delete critical CloudTrail logs and reduce their retention to 1 day? I.e. These logs should be in a S3 bucket or other environment where such changes cannot be made. Alternatively, they should be shipped to a redundant service that manages this risk to prevent data deletion
* Why did Ubiquti not announce they were compromised sooner? The hack started in early December, Ubiquiti noticed the compromise on Dec. 28. Ubiquiti told the market on January 11th. Is that a satisfactory turn around? Giving them some credit for the XMas break I'll say this partially understandable.
All the AWS configuration I'm speaking of above, I would describe as Security 101.
Most of these settings can be set and managed from AWS Organisations for free, and backed up with alarming and alerts for Guard Duty trivially. That a company of Ubiquiti's size and maturity had such basic risks not managed is still a concern.
I understand AWS Organisations can be difficult to set up for legacy AWS accounts, but even with that said, setting the alarms and monitoring up that would help manage the risk associated to the questions above is not difficult and should have been in place.
That Ubiqitui would only find relief ultimately from the developers poor OpSec rather than Ubiquiti's own security policies and procedures provides a commending perspective of their internal security posture.