Some criminals are downright stupid. Yet others find clever and interesting ways to get what they want. Case in point: developer Luke Chadwick received an email from Amazon Cloud services noting that his Amazn Key (an authentication token) was found floating around Github — and that’s when he logged into his account and viewed his usage.
Lo and behold, Chadwick was presented with some, shall we say, shock-inducing statistics. Someone had broken into Chadwick’s cloud computing account and used a whopping 1,427 instance hours on the EC2 platform.
Doing what, exactly? While Chadwick had hoped to keep the computing instances running to further investigate, he didn’t want to rack up his monthly bill, but he did find evidence of litecoin mining.
And speaking of his monthly bill, Chadwick noticed he had been charged a whopping $3493, when he normally spends between $60-$80/month.
Moral of the story: keep your keys safe! (via CoinDesk, via vertis.io)
