Amazon AWS Servers Might Soon Be Held for Ransom [source: bleepingcomputer]

25 Feb 2018

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Amazon AWS S3 cloud storage servers might soon fall victims to ransom attacks, similar to how hacker groups held tens of thousands of MongoDB databases for ransom throughout 2017.

The statement, made today on social media by infosec expert Kevin Beaumont, is nothing short of a prophecy of things to come, an opinion shared by many security professionals to whom Bleeping Computer spoke today.

Amazon AWS S3 known to leak data

Amazon AWS S3 storage servers have been leaking data all 2017, being behind some of the most notable data leaks of last year, including breaches at the NSA, the US Army, analytics providers, and more.

Those incidents happened because companies left data on publicly-readable S3 buckets (“bucket” being a term used to describe an S3 storage unit). In most cases, that data was found by security researchers who helped companies secure their systems, but hackers could get to these files first, too.

However, there’s also a category of S3 buckets that are even more dangerous than publicly-readable servers. Those are publicly-writeable ones —buckets allowing any user, with or without an Amazon S3 account, to write or delete data on the AWS S3 instance. A Skyhigh Networks report from September 2017 found that 7% of all Amazon AWS S3 buckets were publicly-writeable.

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