Hints — S3 Content Recovery - Lab 03

Open each hint only after you’ve spent time investigating on your own.

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Hint 1 — Where to look

The bucket and policy are fine — the problem is with index.html itself.

Open the S3 console, navigate to your bucket, and click on index.html. What information is available about that object?

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Hint 2 — Look at the object's history

S3 can keep a record of every change made to an object over time. Look at the tabs available when you select index.html in the S3 console. Is there a tab that shows more than just the current state of the file?

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Hint 3 — What you are looking for

You should see more than one entry in the object’s history. One of them is the current (broken) file. Another is the original correct file.

Can you delete the current version to reveal the one underneath it?

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Spoiler Alert — Full Solution

Root cause: The bucket has versioning enabled. When the teammate uploaded the new file, S3 stored it as a new version of index.html — but that version contained the wrong content (“Coming Soon”). The original correct file still exists as a previous version.

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To restore the correct content:

1. Open the S3 console and navigate to your bucket
2. Click on index.html
3. Open the Versions tab
4. You will see two versions — the current one (wrong content) and an older one (correct content)
5. Check the box next to the latest version and click Delete
6. Type permanently delete to confirm, then click Delete
7. The previous version is now the active file — open the BucketURL and it should display the AWS Broken Labs welcome page