Code-hosting firm closes shop after hacker deletes Amazon cloud data – and backups

Code Spaces said the cost of attempting to resolve the attack and the expected cost of refunding customers will cause irreparable harm to the company’s finances and reputation.

Extortionists left demands for company officials, after breaking into Code Spaces’ Amazon EC2 control panel.

Code Spaces changed its EC2 passwords, but quickly discovered the attackers had created backup logins, and once recovery attempts were noticed, the attackers began deleting artifacts from the panel.

“We finally managed to get our panel access back, but not before he had removed all EBS snapshots, S3 buckets, all AMI’s, some EBS instances and several machine instances,” Code Spaces said in an apology note on the company’s site. “In summary, most of our data, backups, machine configurations and offsite backups were either partially or completely deleted.”

A few old svn nodes and one git node were not affected, the company said.

Kaspersky Lab notes that an archived Code Spaces page  includes promises of full redundancy, with code duplicated and distributed among data centers on three continents.

“Backing up data is one thing, but it is meaningless without a recovery plan, not only that a recovery plan – and one that is well-practiced and proven to work time and time again,” Code Spaces said. “Code Spaces has a full recovery plan that has been proven to work and is, in fact, practiced.”