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Never worked with AWS, but besides that it obviously shouldn't happen - is it really that bad? Couldn't the keys be invalidated/regenerated immediately after you realized they were compromised?

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Oh, they can and were. But bad actors scrape github constantly for access keys. If you commit yours to a repo, some script somewhere will find those keys and use them to spin up EC2 boxes mining bitcoin or use SES to send scam emails within minutes. You can invalidate the keys and scrub your AWS account once you notice the issue - it just depends on how much damage the bad actors are able to do before you do that.

In my case, our CTO was messaging me (either Slack or Hipchat - whatever we were using at the time) within an our or two. Iirc they only managed to accrue a few thousand dollars in charges before we got it under control.

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