Incident Details
In June of 2014, Codespaces.com was hit by a well-orchestrated DDoS attack that led to the company's shutdown after an unknown threat actor gained access to their Amazon EC2 control panel and demanded payment.
Incident
How Did the Breach Happen?
The breach occurred through a DDoS attack which was then followed by an extortion attempt. The threat actor gained access to Codespaces' Amazon EC2 control panel. Despite password changes by Codespaces, the attacker had already established multiple backdoor logins which they used to delete critical data upon realizing that the company was regaining control.
What Data has been Compromised?
The compromised data included EBS snapshots, S3 buckets, AMIs, and several machines. This led to the loss of most of Codespaces' backups, data, and machine configurations.
Why Did the company's Security Measures Fail?
The security measures failed because the attacker was able to create backdoors before Codespaces could adequately secure their EC2 control panel. This indicates a lack of effective monitoring and response mechanisms to prevent unauthorized access and subsequent damaging actions.
What Immediate Impact Did the Breach Have on the company?
The immediate impact of the breach was devastating; the loss of data and backups was so significant that it led to Codespaces ceasing operations permanently. They could not recover the data or cover the financial costs required to refund customers and resolve the issue.
How could this have been prevented?
This could have been prevented by maintaining a copy of critical data in a separate, non-workload AWS account and engaging AWS Support at the onset of the incident. AWS could potentially have identified the backdoor accesses and helped in recovering the data.
What have we learned from this data breach?
From the Codespaces data breach, we have learned about the importance of having offsite backups, a robust monitoring system to detect unauthorized access, a disaster recovery plan, and the need for an immediate incident response protocol in collaboration with the cloud service provider.
Summary of Coverage
The Codespaces.com data breach of 2014 was an incident where an unknown attacker's DDoS attack evolved into an extortion and culminated in the deletion of substantial company data and backups. This breach not only illustrates the catastrophic consequences of insufficient cybersecurity measures but also underscores critical lessons in cloud security, incident response, and the necessity of backup strategies.