Moving Away From S3 (for a Bit)

May 1, 2024

Yesterday, before getting the TikTok article finished, I made a quick change to this site. I had seen a post from Maciej Pocwierz, “How an empty S3 bucket can make your AWS bill explode”. It scared me because I had previously been serving images directly from S3. I don’t think it’s particularly likely that I would be affected by this, but it’s a really worrying attack vector for anyone with a publicly viewable S3 bucket name.

I decided to move my assets directly into Git, so they’re now hosted on GitHub. Having these sorts of assets directly in the repository doesn’t feel great, but I think it’s OK until I come up with a better solution. I don’t use many images on this site, so it’s only about 7 megabytes of content.

Happily, I saw a post from Simon Wilson this morning which had an update linking to a tweet from Jeff Barr, the Chief Evangelist at AWS. It sounds like this is being looked into and there will hopefully be a solution soon.