Alright, let me walk you through this whole “Brekkie Hill leak” thing I had to sort out recently. It wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, let me tell you.
It started like any other Tuesday, grabbing my coffee, ready to dive into the usual grind. Then I saw the alerts popping up. Way more alerts than usual, flashing red flags all over the monitoring dashboard for the ‘Brekkie Hill’ project. That’s just our internal codename for a customer data processing tool we’d been building.
First Steps: What the Heck is Going On?
First thing, you panic a little, right? But then you gotta get practical. I jumped onto the system logs immediately. Started filtering, looking for anything unusual around the time the alerts kicked off. It was like searching for a needle in a haystack, tons of routine entries just cluttering things up.
I spent a good couple of hours just tracing connections, checking access patterns. Was someone trying to brute force their way in? Was it an internal script gone wild? My mind was racing through all the possibilities.
- Checked server access logs.
- Scanned application error reports.
- Looked at network traffic patterns.
- Tried to replicate the issue in our test environment (no luck there initially).
Digging Deeper: Finding the Source
After lunch (which I basically inhaled at my desk), I started focusing on recent configuration changes. We use a shared repository for our deployment scripts and settings. I started going back through the commit history, commit by commit. Tedious stuff.
Bingo. Found it. Someone, bless their heart, had pushed a config update late the previous day. They’d accidentally changed a storage bucket permission setting from ‘private’ to ‘public-read’. Not for everything, thank god, just for a specific temporary data folder used during one processing step. But still, not good. Data that should have been internal was briefly exposed.
The Cleanup Operation
Okay, finding it was one thing, fixing it and assessing the damage was next.
Immediately reverted the config change. That was the easy part. Stopped the bleeding, so to speak.
Then came the really fun part: figuring out what exactly was in that folder and if anyone outside had accessed it while it was open. More log diving. Cross-referencing IP addresses, checking access timestamps against the window it was exposed.
Thankfully, based on the logs, it looked like no external actors actually grabbed anything sensitive. The window was pretty short, and the data wasn’t our most critical stuff, more like intermediate processing files. Still, it gave us a proper scare.
Lessons Learned (The Hard Way)
We had a long talk afterwards. Put some stricter checks in place for config changes, especially around permissions. Added more specific monitoring for those kinds of storage settings.
It was a stressful couple of days. Reminds you how a tiny mistake, just one wrong setting clicked, can cause a massive headache. You build all these complex systems, but sometimes it’s the simplest things that trip you up. Just glad we caught it relatively quickly and it wasn’t worse. That’s the job sometimes, putting out fires you didn’t start.