This is a true story.
A small startup. One part-time dev in the US. One contractor abroad.
They bring us in for something simple: just help them clean up their project management flow. A small engagement. Low stakes.
First day on the job, the client is panicking.
They’ve just received a massive AWS bill. Thousands of dollars. Gone.
Someone had gotten unauthorized access to privileged AWS keys. But this wasn’t a data breach.
The attacker was spinning up compute resources for crypto mining, and they burned through the company’s AWS credits fast.
The worst part? Those credits were supposed to cover their entire infrastructure for months. Suddenly, that runway vanished.
No one on the team had dealt with a breach before. In a panic, they shut everything down, hoping to stop the bleeding.
They needed more than project management. They needed a rescue plan. Fast. Here’s the exact playbook we ran:
Our Remediation Playbook
Worked directly with AWS support to investigate the attack and push for credit recovery (good news: AWS is usually great in cases like this).
Enabled AWS Organizations to isolate environments and reduce the blast radius in the future.
Rotated all credentials and API keys immediately.
Hunted down the leak: were credentials hardcoded in the frontend? Pushed to a public repo?
Implemented IAM roles with strict, least-privilege policies.
Enabled logging and monitoring tools to catch future threats.
Activated encryption at rest for key data services.
Wrote Infrastructure as Code templates. No more risky clicking around in the Console.
This became the foundation of their CI/CD pipeline.
Reviewed costs and optimized services to avoid overspending again.
Delivered a full report with findings, actions taken, and security guidelines for their devs going forward.
All of this… for a 4-figure investment.
Less than what they lost in credits.
Way less than the stress and chaos it caused.
Delivered in about two weeks.
Don’t wait for the breach.
Don’t wait for the billing alert.
Hardening your infrastructure isn’t just for big companies. It’s for anyone who can’t afford to lose their product, their momentum, or their mind.
A 30-minute review could save months of recovery.
If you’re unsure how secure your cloud setup is, let’s talk.