Bonsai Hosted ElasticSearch Is Down | Hacker News Reader

Bonsai Hosted ElasticSearch Is Down

status.bonsai.io

53 pointssstarr19 comments

How were they 0wned? Lack of MFA, rogue API key, or something else? Are full-access accounts being handed out willy-nilly instead of IAM accounts?

AWS Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA):

http://aws.amazon.com/iam/details/mfa/

AWS Identity Access and Management (IAM):

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/IAMBestPract...

Managing your AWS API Keys:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/SQSG...

Go a step further with your AWS API keys and use AWS' API access logging (CloudTrail):

http://aws.amazon.com/cloudtrail/

Don't get burned. Check your stuff out.

Hey all, Bonsai cofounder here.

It was an old API access key that got leaked, not our account credentials. We're still investigating how and where the key got leaked, but bottom line, it should have been revoked ages ago.

2FA is great, but it doesn't cover API keys. Rotate your API keys!

At this point, MFA for master AWS accounts should be mandatory.

MFA for all console accounts is the only right answer. If machines require credentials to do specific task or perform API calls then roles should be used.

> If machines require credentials to do specific task or perform API calls then roles should be used.

Even then, if the data must be considered highly valuable/immutable, then versioning/delete protection should be enabled for the S3 bucket(s) in questions. This requires the MFA token to be in the API call for the delete to succeed.

Full-blown AWS console compromise - this sounds similar to what happened to Code Spaces (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7909791) Is there a new vulnerability?

It wasn't a management console compromise, it was an old API key that got leaked.

My concern exactly.

Any word on how those accounts are getting compromised?

Have they been complacent (easy password to guess, keys easy to be compromised (maybe in a public github repo)), or could there be some whole in the AWS secutiy model?

If there were a hole in the AWS security model for this, I think it'd be pretty obvious pretty quickly, given what happens when US-East takes a dive...

This happens constantly, and it's almost always through lack of best practices (as mentioned in higher up comment - IAM, MFA, etc.).

This brought my app down. http://jrdevjobs.com. Our shards were all missing from Bonsai. We looped through each model and saved it.

We're back up.

AWS needs to improve usability of IAM so that it gets broader adoption. The learning curve is non-trivial.

What particular issues have you had with IAM? I find that the wizard is a good starting point for understanding the policies.

So is creating policies.... They managed to make dealing with json worse than dealing with xml.

This sucks... I am happy we just put our search cluster on elasticbeanstalk atm, but I wish we had more services like this running.. good news is new security practices will hop up everywhere because of this.

Not to focus on this when they are experiencing downtime, but Bonsai has been one of the least reliable service providers I've ever used.

Good that it's pretty easy to change elastic search provider with little downtime. I'd recommend checking out found.no. We've been pleased with performance and stability. Heck - I can't recall any downtime at all.

qbox.io is another hosted Elasticsearch solution. I have never used them, but one of their developers is very knowledgeable and active on the mailing list.

our site http://www.violetgrey.com went down because of this. Luckily we were able to reindex pretty fast before their backups kicked in. Any ideas on how to have fallbacks in such cases?

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