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AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

seuros.com

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Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#61

Post by foundry27 »

Editorial comment: It’s a bit weird to see AI-written (at least partially; you can see the usual em-dashes, it’s-not-X-it’s-Y) blog posts like this detract from an author’s true writing style, which in this case I found significantly more pleasant to read. Read his first ever post, and compare it to this one and many of the other recent posts: https://www.seuros.com/blog/noflylist-how-noflylist-got-clea...

I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I could imagine a blog post almost identical to this one being generated in response to a prompt like “write a first-person narrative about: a cloud provider abruptly deleting a decade-old account and all associated data without warning. Include a plot twist”.

I literally cannot tell if this story is something that really happened or not. It scares me a little, because if this was a real problem and I was in the author’s shoes, I would want people to believe me.

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#62

Post by wewewedxfgdf »

gerdesj wrote: post #58
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once said to the CTO of the company I worked for "do we back up our source code"? He said, "no, it's on github". I said no more.

I would suggest your CTO needs some gentle reminders about risk management and how the cloud really works. If your boss is that daft, its probably a sign to bail out. Remember to do your own personal due diligence. Due dill is not something that you just do for someone else: do your own! Do your own personal risk assessment. If code was lost, who would be found accountable? You or them? EDIT: PS - I am a CTO ...

But it's github ...... it can't be lost.

Unless github closes the account, or a hacker gets access, or a rogue employee gets mad and deletes all, or some development accident results in repo deletion, or etc etc.

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#63

Post by anonymars »

cmckn wrote: post #46
blargey wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lede buried under that lede is that (according to an insider?) some AWS employee accidentally wiped everything immediately (contrary to typical practice in such situations of retaining data while things get sorted out), leading to a chain of brushing-off / covering-up percolating through whatever support chain the OP was talking to.

> accidentally wiped everything immediately There is no “wipe everything immediately” button.

Did you read the article?

> According to them, AWS MENA was running some kind of proof of concept on “dormant” and “low-activity” accounts. Multiple accounts were affected, not just mine.

If AWS has a 90-day closure policy, why was this account deleted so quickly?

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#64

Post by ageitgey »

foundry27 wrote: post #61

Editorial comment: It’s a bit weird to see AI-written (at least partially; you can see the usual em-dashes, it’s-not-X-it’s-Y) blog posts like this detract from an author’s true writing style, which in this case I found significantly more pleasant to read. Read his first ever post, and compare it to this one and many of the other recent posts: https://www.seuros.com/blog/noflylist-how-noflylist-got-clea... I’m not mu…

I didn't get an AI vibe from this post. Grammar checkers add em dashes, too.

If anything, an AI tool would have written a shorter, less rambling post.

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#65

Post by anonymars »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #44
whstl wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know the quote: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it . A lot of people in this industry have near-zero operations knowledge that doesn't involve AWS, and it's frightening.

True. I get that you can blame someone for having no backups and yoloing their thing. But OP did so much right if the threat model doesn't involve "corporate behemoth anti-user automation nukes everything including backups". Everyone saying "you should've had offsite backups" certainly has a point but 99% of the blame lies with AWS here. This entire process must've crossed so many highly paid "experts" and no one con…

Worth noting that's not the only way this can be a single point of failure, this one was an account breach:

https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/code-spaces-demis...

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#66

Post by EmuAGR »

dboreham wrote: post #31
saltysalt wrote: post #23

This is why I use a local NAS for offline backups.

This is good but not really enough. You need another backup to cover the case where this backup is burned to a crisp when your house catches fire. And that second backup needs to be in another geographic region to guard against regional disasters such as meteor impact, super volcano eruption (possibly not a concern for you but it is for me), etc.

Well, if a meteor impacts and vaporises my entire region, my least concern would be my data.

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#67

Post by koonsolo »

simondotau wrote: post #38
wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once said to the CTO of the company I worked for "do we back up our source code"? He said, "no, it's on github". I said no more.

If the repo is on GitHub and two or more developers keep reasonably up-to-date checkouts on their local computers, the “3-2-1” principle of backups is satisfied. Additionally to that, if any of those developers have a backup strategy for their local computer, those also count as a backup of that source code.

The benefit of DVCS. Losing the source code from github when it's all on local computers is the least of problems.

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#68

Post by koonsolo »

dboreham wrote: post #31
saltysalt wrote: post #23

This is why I use a local NAS for offline backups.

This is good but not really enough. You need another backup to cover the case where this backup is burned to a crisp when your house catches fire. And that second backup needs to be in another geographic region to guard against regional disasters such as meteor impact, super volcano eruption (possibly not a concern for you but it is for me), etc.

The NAS backup is already in a different location, no? Or do you want to take into account when both cloud and your NAS catch fire at the same time?

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#69

Post by klysm »

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #17
floating-io wrote: post #12

My fear of this sort of thing happening is why I don't use github or gitlab.com for primary hosting of my source code; only mirrors. I do primary source control in house, and keep backups on top of that. It's also why nothing in my AWS account is "canonical storage". If I need, say, a database in AWS, it is live-mirrored to somewhere within my control, on hardware I own, even if that thing never sees any production t…

I once said to the CTO of the company I worked for "do we back up our source code"? He said, "no, it's on github". I said no more.

I mean it’s also on everybody’s laptop. Recovering from GitHub going away would be trivial for me

Re: AWS deleted my 10-year account and all data without warning

#70

Post by Dylan16807 »

OutOfHere wrote: post #48
Dylan16807 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If nobody has the repo checked out, what are the odds it's important?

You clearly haven't worked much with code over many years. When laptops change, not all existing projects get checked out. In fact, in VSCode, one can use a project without cloning and checking it out at all.

Honestly I'm just really wondering what the odds are. In particular for code that made it onto git.
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