Fair enough, my morning brain didn't think cloud, though i guess one could argue you're still passing off the risk onto someone else. Either way, its not my expertise
AWS is expensive, in my mind, because of stuff like this. They don't want you to nirror it on aws, so egress is expensive. The $/GB/month storage fees it'll cost to store this while exploring it is not cheap, either. And once you have an idea of the data you want to move out of the gap, you want to process /extract it quickly (because of $/GB/Month costs...)
I just thought about a spare machine I have with a 12TB spindle and an SSD not plugged into a network.
I understand how to airgap, and unless something can magically worm it's way through HDMI that's probably how I'd get data out, just to be annoying to everyone. To be fair.
A EC2 (vm) on aws with a little bit of CPU, Memory and enough storage attached, costs 1k per month which is something like $1.5 per Hour.
Its not necessarily about storing it longerm, its about 'looking into it'.
I don't get the Airgap thing though at all. There is a very minimal chance that this contains a zero day. The idea of a zero day is, that you can attack systems and you sell it to people who have high profile targets or systems.
Some random person downloading leaked data, everyone can download, is not a real target for a zero day.
And a zero day which breaks random unpacking tools and your vm/system, would be worth even more.
