AWS S3 storage bucket with unlucky name nearly cost developer $1,300
Some of that data came from companies with customers, which is part of why Pocwierz is keeping the specifics under wraps. He wrote to Ars that he contacted some of the companies that either tried or successfully backed up their data to his bucket, and "they completely ignored me." "So now instead of having this fixed, their data is still at risk," Pocwierz writes. "My lesson is if I ever run a company, I will definitely have a bug bounty program, and I will treat such warnings seriously."
As for Pocwierz's accounts, both S3 and bank, it mostly ended well. An AWS representative reached out on LinkedIn and canceled his bill, he said, and was told that anybody can request refunds for excessive unauthorized requests. "But they didn't explicitly say that they will necessarily approve it," he wrote. He noted in his Medium post that AWS "emphasized that this was done as an exception."
In response to Pocwierz's story, Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for AWS at Amazon, tweeted that "We agree that customers should not have to pay for unauthorized requests that they did not initiate." Barr added that Amazon would have more to share on how the company could prevent them "shortly." AWS has a brief explainer and contact page on unexpected AWS charges.
The open source tool did change its default configuration after Pocwierz contacted them. Pocwierz suggested to AWS that it should restrict anyone else from creating a bucket name like his, but he had yet to hear back about it. He suggests in his blog post that, beyond random bad luck, adding a random suffix to your bucket name and explicitly specifying your AWS region can help avoid massive charges like the one he narrowly dodged.