←back to thread

Ask HN: Our AWS account got compromised after their outage

391 points kinj28 | 1 comments | 21 Oct 25 15:55 UTC | HN request time: 0.244s | source

Could there be any link between the two events?

Here is what happened:

Some 600 instances were spawned within 3 hours before AWS flagged it off and sent us a health event. There were numerous domains verified and we could see SES quota increase request was made.

We are still investigating the vulnerability at our end. our initial suspect list has 2 suspects. api key or console access where MFA wasn’t enabled.

1. bdcravens ◴[21 Oct 25 16:18 UTC] No.45657644[source]▶
Any chance you did something crazy while troubleshooting downtime (before you knew it was an AWS issue)? I've had to deal with a similar situation, and in my case, I was lazy and pushed a key to a public repo. (Not saying you are, just saying in my case it was a leaked API key)