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Rotate, Repave, and Repair “Its idea is quite simple. Rotate datacenter credentials every few minutes or hours. Repave every server and application in the datacenter every few hours from a known good state. Repair vulnerable operating systems and application stacks consistently within hours of patch availability. Faster is safer.” https://builttoadapt.io/the-three-r-s-of-enterprise-security...

Obscurity does provide additional security.

They aren’t trying to obscure, they’re trying to be a moving target.

Perhaps proving that you're running on the same hardware as Coinbase is most easily done by statistical attacks, which requires collecting data over time.

> How does cycling AWS instances quickly provide additional security beyond obscurity?

The same way issuing a new session token for each login improves security. If the changes are unpredictable, whatever process an attacker uses to guess the correct target must be restarted every time the target changes.

When you reboot your EC2 instance, that VM is provisioned on a (patched) system.

Yes, they would have been better off leaving out this "cycling" bit altogether.