The Windows Flaw That Cracks Amazon Web Services 114
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Unknown Lamer
from the you're-doing-it-wrong dept.
from the you're-doing-it-wrong dept.
Nerval's Lobster writes "Developer and editor Jeff Cogswell decided to poke around the security of Amazon Web Services, and found a potential loophole that could theoretically allow anyone — a developer, an unscrupulous Amazon employee, the NSA — to access and copy data volumes stored on the system, using a slightly modified version of the popular 'chntwp' password tool. In this article, he breaks down how he did it, and suggests some ways for those who use cloud-hosting services to keep their data a little more secure in the future. 'The key here, of course, is that an unscrupulous employee might be able to make a copy of any existing Windows volume, and go to work on it without the customer ever knowing that it happened,' he writes. 'Now let's be clear: I'm not accusing anyone of having done this; in fact, I doubt anybody has, considering I was unable to find a working copy of chntpw until I modified it.' It's a security concern, and one that's particularly insidious to patch."
This just in (Score:5, Informative)
People with access to your data are able to access your data.
Not actually a problem with AWS. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Windows volumes... (Score:5, Informative)
Too bad the author of TFA is a flaming idiot, and this has nothing to do with Windows at all. It's a total non-story.
He just "discovered" that if you download a cloud machine disk volume - which is completely OS-agnostic, you could do it BeOS if you wanted to - you can mount it on your own machine and go to town on the data. Unix-like OS? Cool, go read /etc/shadow and get the password hashes (or change/add your own password and re-mount it, as he suggests doing with Windows). There's absolutely nothing here Windows-specific at all except that the idiot only *just* discovered that password resetting by modifying the user login data is possible.