Researchers Find AWS Backups Leaking Data

[engine]

Amazon hosted S3 buckets are leaking sensitive data, according to researchers. Often, the settings are inadvertently set to public, allowing anyone access, however, these are Elastic Block Storage (EBS) snapshots which store secret keys to user applications.

“When you get rid of the hard disk for your computer, you know, you usually shredded or wipe it completely,” he said. “But these public EBS volumes are just left for anyone to take and start poking at.”

[techcrunch.com...]

Check your settings and make appropriate changes.

[Dimitri]

you usually shredded or wipe it completely

I wonder how many people are effectively doing this ...

I've been using numerous hosts since the mid 90s. Each time I get a dedicated server, I checked for what was recoverable from the disk, and half of the times, data were recoverable (db, usernames, emails, password, sometimes even stored in plain text, etc...). Meaning the previous owner didn't wiped the disk AND the host didn't wiped it either before allocating the server to a new client.

[graeme_p]

It happens all the time:

[theregister.co.uk...]
[theregister.co.uk...]
[newsweek.com...]