Tales From the AWS Crypt - A Collection of User Horror Stories
summary
A company wakes to a $166,000 AWS Lambda bill after an infinite recursion: a Lambda reads from SQS and writes back, thousands of invocations in hours; recursion protection skips only on failed exit codes and the code swallowed errors and requeued messages, so the protection never triggers—set real‑time usage alarms (invocations, memory, CPU) not just cost alerts. Another case: a third‑party API key with excessive permissions lets attackers read an ECR image, extract hardcoded admin creds, and pull source from CodeArtifact—follow least privilege and do not hardcode credentials (use Secrets Manager or a vault).
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