I am a longtime Amazon.com customer, and now I am interested in using Amazon Web Services (AWS). So I have a question on creating an AWS account.
Do I have an option to create an AWS account that's completely separate from my Amazon.com account (with different email addresses)?
What would happen if I use the same email address for AWS and Amazon.com?
Soooo..... Ages ago... I made an AWS account, it will not let me log in to normal amazon.com with that account telling me every time my password is incorrect which it is not.... attempting to create a new account with same email asks me if i want to disable my old account..... so yea it seems the answer is:
YES: simply create the account from AWS.
If creating accounts at amazon.com THEN aws with same e-mail, you will have one linked account to log in to both.
On the other hand if both are created seperately on different e-mails, and somehow one gets compromised the other doesn't, but then you have two different logins to deal with.
So as it turns out they lied about it disabling my aws account, I decided to try it, and now I have two accounts under the same e-mail, with different passwords... So if you want that, create on aws first, then create with same email on amazon.com and when it says it will disable the other account, don't worry it won't, however it will require you to choose a different password.
Oh and one last thing... If I try to log into AWS with Amazon.com password it brings me to create a new AWS account and it's a pain to get out of that screen...
My Amazon Retail account was compromised last week. I closed it and guess what - no access to my Amazon AWS account. On querying this I was told (by Amazon) that you have to have an Amazon Retail account and that it has to be THE SAME account as your AWS one.
So a service that is a honeypot for criminals gives them the keys to your Web based business, and Amazon have zero interest in separating the two. That is nuts - sites are moving next week, can't take the risk.
People have been shouting about it on the Amazon forum for years, so I think that whilst there may be workarounds the fundamental principle must be correct. I can't risk playing about with workarounds for something as dumb as this.
These are both great questions
First,
Yes, you can and SHOULD create an aws root account email that is unique for your AWS account(s). While approaches may vary, and your email server may filter out what would otherwise be perfectly applicable emails, here is how I do it
I create an email account that is ONLY for my AWS root accounts.
AWS Requires EVERY AWS account to have a unique email
here is my pattern: myname.aws.accts#gmail.com
I have an admin (Organization) account, so I use the following email: myname.aws.accts+admin#gmail.com
I have one prod, one test and one dev account. Here are the following email patterns:
myname.aws.accts+prod#gmail.com; myname.aws.accts+test#gmail.com; myname.aws.accts+dev#gmail.com.
I've also used the pattern: myname.aws.accts+123456789012#gmail.com where 123456789012 represents the AWS Account number.
These are all interpreted as unique by AWS but route to the same email account: myname.aws.accts#gmail.com
One last comment. I have another client who uses MS Exchange and for some reason the email+extension#mybiz.com has the 'extension' portion filtered out, and these emails do NOT process. In this biz we worked around this by creating alias' emails that are still unique to AWS and aliased them in the exchange server to the awsadmin# email. does the job. probably not best practice, but in a pinch...
Second
Yes. You can link your AWS and amazon.com accounts to the same root user email.
DON'T DO IT
This is generally an anti-pattern. NOT best practice, and fraught with problems...
I know of no good reason to do this. Once done, it is nigh near impossible to convince AWS - AMAZON to unlink these accounts. You WONT be able to separate them yourself - they are strongly coupled once the link is made. you might succeed in separating your AWS and AMAZON account if you are a paying customer of AWS business or Enterprise level support, and even then, they may tell you to just delete the AWS account if you don't want AWS and amazon shared.
Once the two accounts - store and AWS - are created with the same email account, I believe they are forever linked via a single master Amazon account, and there seems to be no way to separate them: If you change the password or email address on one, it reflects in the other.
When my only AWS use was an unimportant VM with a website, it was no big deal, but once I start hosting higher-value stuff, it gets a lot more scary.
As far as I can tell, the only way to separate them is to create a new AWS account (with different email address) and transfer your resources from the old to the new.
This appears to be a painful exercise, you can't directly move an EC2 instance, though you can transfer a snapshot of an image, but everything else I don't know about yet. I would be surprised if I could transfer a fixed Elastic IP, which means changing an IP address I've been using for a long time.
In the short term - as far as I can tell - the only way to secure AWS from your consumer account compromise is to put MFA on the AWS account and then use IAM for access. That's not a bad idea anyway.
I'll be creating a new AWS account (with different email address) for all stuff going forward, and transitioning old-to-new as I get to it, but this looks like a miserable (and unbillable) exercise.
It's just crazy that Amazon doesn't appear to have a way to address this.
Yay for me being an early adopter?
EDIT: It might be possible to link two accounts via "Organizations"; that might give some options for migration that are a bit less painful. Not sure yet.
EDIT Nov 2022: Amazon appears to have rolled out split credentials: when I logged into my unified account - same email for store and AWS - it invited me to create a diff password for the AWS stuff. This is wonderful!
So your AWS and Amazon are the same accounts so you cannot create a separate retail account with the same address. (Though you can get around it by doing email+SOMETHING#domain.toplevel) So if your amazon.com account gets compromised, they theoretically have access to your AWS account.
To keep your AWS account secure, there are a few things you can do. Firstly and probably most importantly, you need to make sure you have MFA setup on the account. In fact, you should do this whether you use amazon.com with the same account or not.
I heavily suggest looking at the Trusted Advisor Best Practice Checks on AWS' website.
The rule of thumb here: they are not interchangeable.
If you created AWS account it will not allow you to login automatically to Amazon.com.
The same with consumer account, it doesn't provide access to AWS by default, because AWS has separate verification process.
Amazon Music account means access to consumer Amazon.com but not to AWS.
Though, I never tried to delete AWS and don't know what happens if you delete either of them, whether this causes deletion of the other or not.
Related
Following Coursera Architecting with Google Kubernetes Engine for switching to Service Account.
It says create and download a key file and authenticate using the key. Is this the common way in GCP? There will be many keys created by developers and downloaded to many laptops or servers scattering the keys in many places, which seems to be not secure manner.
Answering your question, yes. The service accounts are the common way to authenticate in GCP.
There are two different service account types, and the recommendation is to use the second one:
User Managed Service Accounts: to authenticate you will then need a “password” that comes in the form of Service Account Key (json file), and if you leak the service account key, the service account can be considered compromised.
Using keys implies that you are in charge of their lifecycle and security, and it’s a lot to ask because:
You need a robust system for secrets distribution.
You need to implement a key rotation policy.
You need to implement safeguards to prevent key leaks.
Google Managed Service Account: Google Managed Service Accounts, are SAs for which you don’t need to generate keys and your applications can just assume their identity. No keys are involved: the VM will continuously request short lived authorization tokens from the metadata service.
Documentation
NO, no and no, don't use service account key file. As you smell it, you are right, it's a terrible thing for the security.
Today, there are several way to prevent the service account key usage, even if, in some corner case, you need them.
I have wrote bunch of articles on that topics:
the limits
the service account credential API
and a fight against a Google dev advocate and one of his article
Because YES, even Google tutorials, courses, documentation (...) promote that bad practice for years and continue. It was my nightmare in my previous company, and I increased my knowledge and skill to prevent key usage and find workarounds. Let me know your use case, I will try to help your the most
We are in the process of transferring what we currently have in our on-premises infrastructure to the cloud and taking advantage of what AWS has to offer. We are in the process of planning how we can make this process as smooth as possible, so one of the first things that came to mind was, What are the best possible solutions to implement what we currently have in our premises with users registered in AD and how we will be able to manage them, e.g. we create a new user in AD and automatically we can see that new user in our AWS environment so we don't have to manage them on premises as well as AWS and so they can sync?
The next question which I think the answer is Control Tower (and that's why I'm sending my question on this topic), but I would like to confirm and see if there are any other options out there that we might me missing.
As I said earlier, we are in the process of transferring our current on-site infrastructure to the cloud, so at this time we have three environments where we manage development: Development, Staging and Production. We thought of having each of them separated in their own AWS account so we can manage them individually but also we want a way to easy switch accounts between them and possibly get one consolidated bill for all of those three accounts but with the details in each account, and be able to easily make them communicate resources in one account to resources in another account. What would be the best solution for these challenges in AWS if someone can suggest best practices on these?
Thank you so much for your help!
For the AD connection, you can use the AWS AD Connector service. The official AWS blog has a tutorial: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/how-to-connect-your-on-premises-active-directory-to-aws-using-ad-connector/
Billing for a multi-account organization is pretty straightforward, all sub-accounts pay through the root account so you won't have to worry about separation of billing.
Communicating between the environments (accounts), however, requires a bit more legwork. You can use a hub and spoke model and reach out to all environments from an individual environment, or, you can create trust relationships between roles and resources via IAM policy in different accounts and map them to one another.
I'm working with a client right now that has a legacy application hosted by a 3rd party vendor on their amazon account. That legacy app was using Amazon SES for their mailing.
I created the clients own amazon account (as I don't have access to continue the build out on clients account), and am now seeing the issue where I need to transition the SES DNS validation over to their account.
I'm wondering what kind of downtime I would see, or problems I'd create by updating the DNS entry of _amazonses.mydomain.com from what it was on the past account to this new account.
My concern is by updating that entry, I would break the legacy system which I don't have the ability to update.
Thank you
You don't have any downtime, you can verify the domains in two different account, it just you need to add multiple TXT value to the record "_amazonses.mydomain.com".
e.g: _amazonses.mydomain.com
"txt-value-1"
"txt-value0-2"
As long as your clients are using their own credentials, emails flow just fine, once you confirm everything is good, you can remove your record from there.
If no,
You can still use SES sending authorization and allow them to use the domain verified in your account, doing this, they can only use your sending domain to send emails but emails will go from their account and they will be charged, their account should be in production.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/sending-authorization.html
We are a small startup currently in prototype phase. We are still in development phase, and are using AWS to host our application and (test) domain. We have hosted our domain on Route 53, and registered that with SES for email services.
I am new to AWS, and have used domination to understand how to set these things up. Now it appears that our account(s) have been compromised/hacked and someone is missing it to send malicious emails. I am unsure what is the extend of hack, and if the users is only managed to get access to SES and Database credentials. I received an email from SES team, which shows emails have been send through my domain (not by me), but I never created that email on my domain.
Additionally, I have noticed that someone is trying to access my database (from China) and database is always at 100%. Database log says it has blocked IP (which is based in China).
We are using GitHub to store code, and in our code we had credentials for AWS and SMTB servers so I think its possible that someone stoke keys from there (we have taken credential out of GitHub now).
Can someone help me understand what steps do I need to take. I am thinking to shut down this environment and create a new one, but I am unsure how to get hold of my domain and shut down all emails created by spammer on my domain. I am also unclear what is the extend of hack, and if this will come back.
Cam someone please help.
You should never store your credentials in github.
In fact, you should use roles instead of credentials stored directly in the code.
So, step by step you should:
Remove the credentials from github and from your code (done)
Reset your credentials and do not store them
Create a role with the policy according to your needs
Assign that role to your resources.
Here you can found more info
I will be hosting infrastructure for several different clients. Complete, total, 100% separation of client's AWS infrastructure is necessary (leagal etc). So I need some advice on how best to structure my accounts.
I will have a master account with MFA. It will not actually ever spin-up and infrastructure. It is merely to be a top-level billing account. Then each client will have their own separate AWS account. With I guess a separate root login and separate MFA. Each client account will be linked to the Master account for consolidated billing. This is neat because if they move their business else where then we just give them the IAM details for the account and strike it off from Master and we are done.
What I am not sure of is that to set up a brand new AWS account you need a unique email account. We don't want the client to ever have to first setup the account so do we need to have a whole bunch of email aliases to use on our company domain (client#mydomain.com, client2#mydomain.com etc) and then use them to set up new AWS accounts? Is there a better way than this? It could get pretty clunky to have to have a new email alias every time a new client joins.
Second, will we need a box full of MFA devices - one for each account, or will the same device work for all accounts?
Any pointers gratefully received. Thanks
If you have a Gmail address like example#gmail.com, then you can register AWS accounts using email addresses like:
example+CUSTOMER1#gmail.com
example+CUSTOMER2#gmail.com
example+CUSTOMER3#gmail.com
and all the emails will go to your same gmail account. You could auto forward from gmail to another address.
This also works for Google Apps email addresses, if you are using that to host your company email.
Instead of physical MFA devices, you can use the Google Authenticator app on an Android or iPhone with one entry for each customer AWS account.
You mention consolidated billing in your question title, but not in your question.
Beware the following re. consolidated billing:
If you purchase reserved instances for one client, the benefit of that will be shared with all your clients, so your costs will be out of sync.
If you plan to re-charge your clients, and you want to use reserved instances, don't use consolidated billing.
As for you question:
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/12096?hl=en
Most email platforms support some form of aliasing.
You may also be interested in
http://www.nightbluefruit.com/blog/2014/02/command-line-tool-for-checking-status-of-instances-in-amazon-ec2/