Let me get this right: you give a parade of short-term contractors access to your production AWS account, presumably without proper permission segmentation, and neglect to do anything _other_ than that?
I assume you revoke access later, but I doubt you audit anything that they may have done (like create keys that outlive their access) in the account or that any of it is version controlled or traceable.
And you’re surprised you’re in this situation?
And fair enough, you pay your contractors to do a specific job. None of them are going to point out that the way you’re managing your infrastructure is pretty slow and inefficient, or that perhaps there’s a better way to do any of what you’re doing on AWS that is cheaper, faster, more secure and that might give you a far quicker iteration time with the added advantage that you won’t fall apart with a surprise bill like this. They, after all, are working on “development”.
