The day Amazon put me under pressure...

It's Monday, August 12, 2019, 8:00 AM.

As every Monday, I start sorting through any work emails I might have received over the weekend, and among the few titles with no real interest, three words jump out at me: Amazon. EC2. Abuse.

Amazon EC2 Abuse

My blood runs cold and I jump on the email to open it, because even though I don't yet know what it's about, my biggest fear is that my AWS account could be permanently closed!

Here's a copy of the first few lines of the email:

But surprise! It hadn't arrived alone, because I had received the first email on Saturday and since I hadn't seen it, I received this one the next day:

These two emails informed me that one of the EC2 instances I had set up had been used to attempt to break into websites on multiple occasions, notably through brute force attacks.

Even though the content of the emails suggests that at worst the instances in question would simply be stopped if I didn't find a solution, I was still under pressure, this is Amazon after all.

I have to say the term "abuse" sent a chill down my spine...

The explanation

At that time, I was livestreaming every day on Twitch the development of my Kalico project, a personal shopping assistant for high-tech products. Every morning, two hours a day, I develop new features, fix bugs, etc.

But that week, I was working on a crawler meant to fetch product prices directly from Amazon, and more specifically on setting up three proxies in order to access different prices based on geographic location (France, US, and UK).

This is precisely why the email put me under pressure, because I thought Amazon had just detected my crawler and that instead of simply blocking it, they wanted to shut down my AWS account.

When in fact...

In the rush, after setting up the three proxy instances on Friday morning, I didn't take the time to restrict access to only my application. A glaring mistake, and that was of course without counting on all the bots roaming the net tirelessly scanning open EC2 instances in order to exploit them for malicious purposes.

I ended up shutting down the instances that very day to secure the proxies, before bringing them back up right after, and since then I've never had a problem with Amazon again!

Phew!