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A bug in the GitHub Extension for Visual Studio 2015 ultimately led a South African web developer to be charged $6,500 for Amazon Web Services instances used by criminals [theregister.co.uk]:
Carlo van Wyk of Cape Town–based Humankode said he used the GitHub Extension for Visual Studio 2015 to commit one of his local Git code repositories to a private repository on GitHub. Unfortunately, however – and unknown to van Wyk at the time – a bug in the extension caused his code to be committed to a public GitHub repository, rather than a private one as he intended.
The extension is developed and maintained by GitHub itself, although it was created with a little help from Microsoft. Van Wyk said in his blog post [humankode.com] that both companies have since been in touch with him and the bug has been confirmed [github.com] and patched. But that won't help mitigate the fallout of what happened after van Wyk committed his repo.
Within around ten minutes after publishing his code, he received a notification from Amazon Web Services telling him his account had been compromised. He had (somewhat foolishly [amazon.com]) included an AWS access key in the code that he had committed to GitHub.
It's not entirely clear what happened next. Van Wyk said he immediately changed his AWS root password, revoked all of his access keys, and created new ones. Nonetheless, within hours the data thieves had managed to sign him up for AWS's Elastic Compute Cluster and fire off more than 20 instances in each EC2 region. By the time the dust cleared, his AWS account had racked up a bill of $6,484.99.
Such cases aren't new. Miscreants – probably Bitcoin miners, in most cases – have begun routinely trolling public GitHub repositories with bots that search for AWS keys. In van Wyk's case, however, he never expected his repo to be public in the first place.
[...] GitHub, on the other hand, has apologized for the error in its code, describing it as "inexcusable." GitHub team member Phil Haack added, "As for preventing this in the future, we are trying to take a comprehensive look at the conditions and systems that allowed this happen in the first place and how we can improve those systems to mitigate such issues in the future."