The author of the Have I Been Pwnd website got a nasty surprise: an AU $5,000 bill from Azure (that eventually racked up to $11,000). The culprit: a sudden spike of outgoing bandwidth due to a file no longer being cached properly.
I guess I’m looking at this a bit like the last time I lost data due to a hard disk failure. I always knew there was a risk but until it actually happened, I didn’t take the necessary steps to protect against that risk doing actual damage. But hey, it could have been so much worse; that number could have been 10x higher and I wouldn’t have known any earlier.
Let this be a reminder to set up data and billing alerts for your cloud services.