Code Spaces break-in lessons: using your infrastructure provider for backup is a single point of failure

Summary of the events of the Code Space break-in: Code Spaces was hosting their services on Amazon Web Services VPS infrastructure. An attacker managed to gain access to their AWS administration console account and after his demands for ransom were not answered, proceeded to delete all the data in the account.

The disaster recovery plan for Code Spaces was based on having machine images and data backups stored in AWS, everything was gone, and Code Spaces basically had to shutdown.

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Script Day: Automatically backup your EC2 instance using snapshots

The following script I install as a cron job on Amazon AWS virtual machines I deploy, to allow them to backup themselves automatically. The script uses the EC2 management utilities that are normally available on “Amazon Linux” installations (and can be easily installed on other Linux distributions) to create EBS snapshots of the current mounted root EBS volume1.
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  1. I don’t expect this script to work for instances that have an instance-stored root device, but I don’t expect to encounter these any more [↩]

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