5 Reasons Why You Need to Back Up Your Amazon S3

Amazon S3 pioneered cloud object storage at Internet scale in 2006. It has since evolved from a scalable storage service into core infrastructure for modern applications. It is no longer just a destination for archived data. Today, organizations rely on it to power AI pipelines, real-time analytics, and cloud-native workloads.  

With high-value, business-critical data now flowing through Amazon S3, the stakes for protecting it have never been higher.  

Native Features Don't Ensure Comprehensive Data Protection 

Amazon S3 provides strong durability and operational safeguards, such as eleven nines object durability across multiple Availability Zones, bucket Versioning with delete markers, replication, lifecycle policies, and optional controls like Amazon S3 Object Lock and MFA Delete. These capabilities help mitigate hardware failures and reduce everyday mistakes. 

What they do not guarantee is resilience when the control-plane is compromised, for example stolen credentials, over-permissive automation, misapplied Identity Access Management (IAM) or policies, or large-scale operator error. Because many features mirror the current state, they can propagate deletes, corruptions, or policy changes just as quickly as a healthy state. Even with native features enabled, critical data can still be lost, often without warning, until it’s too late. 

Here are five reasons you need an immutable, separately governed backup for your Amazon S3 data. 

1. Security Incidents 

Amazon S3 often stores massive volumes of valuable business data. But when access controls are misused or credentials are compromised, the consequences can be severe. Attackers can delete data, disable protection settings, or make changes that affect entire environments. Even with built-in safeguards like Object Lock, environments without stricter settings remain exposed to tampering and potential data loss. 

Documented Incident: In January 2025, researchers reported a ransomware campaign called Codefinger that abused Amazon S3 Server-Side Encryption with Customer-Provided Keys (SSE-C). After stealing valid AWS credentials, the attackers used standard S3 calls to overwrite data and re-encrypt it with keys only they controlled. This did not exploit an AWS flaw; it relied on misuse of native features after credential compromise. 

The result was immediate loss of access for victims, since AWS does not store customer-provided keys. Several reports also noted use of lifecycle settings to schedule rapid deletion, increasing pressure to pay. Public disclosures began in January 2025, followed by guidance on detecting and blocking unintended SSE-C activity. [^1] [^2] 

2. Administrative Misconfigurations 

Not every data loss event is caused by an external threat. Often, it’s human error. A mistyped rule or overlooked setting can lead to accidental deletions, overwritten files, or storage transitions that break workflows. Without Versioning or immutability in place, small mistakes can quickly become unrecoverable. 

Documented Incident: A U.S. healthcare provider’s Amazon S3 bucket was misconfigured, which allowed access without proper authentication. An unauthorized actor used that access to download data and then issue Delete operations against the bucket, deleting medical records without recovery options for roughly 3.25 million individuals. The breach was publicly disclosed in January 2021. The bucket had no Versioning or Object Lock, so once objects were deleted there was no native path to restore the latest copies. The provider had to rebuild data from other systems and offer credit monitoring. This incident serves as an example of how one misconfigured policy can cause permanent data loss. [^3] 

3. Compliance and Governance Enforcement 

Meeting compliance requirements often involves strict data controls such as retention rules, legal holds, and immutability settings. These measures are critical for audit readiness and long-term protection, but they can introduce operational friction. Broad retention periods may increase storage costs, and rigid policies can slow down cleanup or interfere with recovery. 

Documented Incident:  An incident shared on AWS in Plain English described how an engineering team added a lifecycle rule to delete logs older than 30 days to reduce storage costs. The rule unintentionally matched log prefixes that required 90-day retention. Because lifecycle rules apply to existing objects, Amazon S3 queued those logs for deletion and removed them in the next cycle. 

As a result, the organization lost months of audit history, experienced gaps in analytics, and had to rebuild visibility from secondary systems. One misconfigured policy led to permanent data loss and a major operational setback. [^4] 

4. Operational and Platform Failures 

Even well-managed environments face disruption. Failed uploads, processing delays, or misconfigured automation can corrupt or block access to data. In rare cases, platform-side issues or tool-related bugs may make the problem worse. When multiple systems depend on Amazon S3 at once, even small disruptions can have a significant impact. 

Documented Incident: In a high-profile global outage on October 20, 2025, internal AWS networking failures and DNS issues led to cascading service disruptions across many services, including S3. Although AWS stated there was no confirmed data loss, many users encountered failed uploads, timeouts, and delays in accessing or writing data—raising risk of potential data loss for systems unable to complete writes or recover incomplete transactions. [^5] 

5. Supply Chain Compromise by the Cloud Vendor 

Every business is subject to supply chain risk, and hyperscale cloud providers are no exception. Issues affecting AWS or its upstream dependencies can ripple outward and disrupt many customers, causing data access disruptions, even when account configurations are correct. Impacts can include failed encryption or decryption operations (for KMS-dependent workloads), blocked access to buckets, stalled replication or lifecycle processing, and broader control-plane instability. 

Documented Incident: In July 2025, AWS disclosed that the Amazon Q Developer VS Code extension version 1.84.0 briefly shipped with malicious code after a threat actor used an over-permissive GitHub token to push changes into the build pipeline. AWS pulled the release and issued a fixed version. 

The injected code was designed to wipe local files and delete cloud resources, including S3 buckets, which could have caused widespread data loss if executed at scale across the extension installed base. AWS revoked credentials, removed the injected code, and reported no customer assets were impacted. This incident shows how even a trusted vendor’s mistake can lead to destructive access inside well-configured customer environments. [^6] 

Immutable, Logically Air-Gapped Backups for Rapid Recovery 

If one approach ensures operational resilience across the scenarios above, it is an immutable, logically air-gapped backup with independent policies and point-in-time recovery. 

‘Logically air-gapped’ means your backups live in a separate AWS account with distinct credentials and roles, with immutability or time-based retention, so changes in production cannot modify or delete backup copies. Even if production access or configuration is tampered with, those copies remain intact, giving you a clean, known good restore path at scale. 

HYCU, in partnership with Dell, delivers exactly that. We provide cost-efficient, ransomware-resilient backups for Amazon S3 so you can recover with confidence even in the most challenging scenarios. Use DDVE on AWS as your primary backup target for Amazon S3 data. 

For BCDR, replicate an immutable secondary copy from DDVE on AWS to DDVE on Google Cloud or Azure. This approach helps minimize cross-cloud egress and storage costs while reducing correlated risks from provider issues and regional dependencies. 

Fast to deploy. Easy to manage. Immutable by design. 

Check out https://www.hycu.com/solutions/data-protection/dell-powerprotect-data-domain to see how HYCU and Dell deliver cost-efficient and resilient backup for Amazon S3. _________________________________________________________________________________ 

References 

1. Halcyon RISE Team. (2025, January 13). Abusing AWS native services: ransomware encrypting S3 buckets with SSE-C. Halcyon.ai. 

https://www.halcyon.ai/blog/abusing-aws-native-services-ransomware-encrypting-s3-buckets-with-sse-c  

2. Arghire, I. (2025, January 14). Compromised AWS keys abused in Codefinger ransomware attacks. SecurityWeek. 

https://www.securityweek.com/compromised-aws-keys-abused-in-codefinger-ransomware-attacks/ 

3. Alder, S. (2021, December 30). Largest Healthcare Data Breaches of 2021. HIPAA Journal. 

https://www.hipaajournal.com/largest-healthcare-data-breaches-of-2021 

4. Sandesh. (2025, June 18). Our Mistake with S3 Lifecycle Rules (and How We Fixed Data Loss). AWS in Plain English. 
   https://aws.plainenglish.io/our-mistake-with-s3-lifecycle-rules-and-how-we-fixed-data-loss-476b8f86e469
5. Amazon. (2025, October 20). Update — AWS services operating normally. About Amazon. 
   https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/aws/aws-service-disruptions-outage-update
6. Amazon Web Services. (2025, July 23). Security Update for Amazon Q Developer Extension for Visual Studio Code (Version 1.84). AWS Security Bulletins. 
   https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/AWS-2025-015/