AWS Defaults Silently Introduce New Attack Paths That Let Hackers Escalate Privilege & Account Compromise

Aqua Security researchers identified these high-risk default roles across multiple AWS services, including SageMaker, Glue, and EMR, as well as in popular open-source projects like Ray. Researchers demonstrated that simply importing a malicious model from Hugging Face into SageMaker could trigger code execution under a highly privileged role. Security researchers have uncovered a serious vulnerability in AWS cloud environments where default configurations can silently create dangerous attack paths. Cyber Security News is a Dedicated News Platform For Cyber News, Cyber Attack News, Hacking News & Vulnerability Analysis. This previously underestimated risk stems not from user-created misconfigurations but from AWS’s own default settings that automatically deploy overly permissive IAM roles across several services. These “shadow roles,” often created during initial service setup, grant excessive permissions that attackers can exploit to escalate privileges and potentially compromise entire AWS accounts. This permission doesn’t just expose stored data – it enables attackers to manipulate internal behavior of numerous AWS services that rely on S3 for essential assets like scripts, configuration files, and templates. The malicious code then leverages the broad S3 permissions to compromise other services, potentially leading to complete account takeover. The team demonstrated how these roles, originally intended for narrow service-specific use, can be weaponized to perform administrative actions and break isolation boundaries between services. With years of experience under his belt in Cyber Security, he is covering Cyber Security News, technology and other news. The vulnerability centers primarily around default roles that include the AmazonS3FullAccess policy or equivalent broad S3 permissions. If any role in an AWS account has AmazonS3FullAccess, it effectively has read/write access to every S3 bucket and, by extension, the ability to tamper with multiple AWS services. When a Hugging Face model containing an inference.py file is imported, SageMaker automatically executes this code even if trust_remote_code=False.

This Cyber News was published on cybersecuritynews.com. Publication date: Wed, 30 Apr 2025 15:10:23 +0000


Cyber News related to AWS Defaults Silently Introduce New Attack Paths That Let Hackers Escalate Privilege & Account Compromise

9 Best DDoS Protection Service Providers for 2024 - eSecurity Planet content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More. One of the most powerful defenses an organization can employ against distributed ...
1 year ago Esecurityplanet.com
GCP to AWS migration: A Comprehensive Guide - Embarking on a GCP to AWS migration journey can be both exciting and challenging. Before we dive into the technical details, let's explore why businesses might consider migrating from GCP to AWS. While GCP offers a range of services, AWS boasts an ...
1 year ago Feeds.dzone.com
CrowdStrike Demonstrates Cloud Security Leadership at AWS re:Invent - CrowdStrike is honored to be named Partner of the Year for several 2023 Geo and Global AWS Partner Awards at Amazon Web Services re:Invent 2023, where we are participating this year as a Diamond Sponsor. These accomplishments demonstrate our ...
1 year ago Crowdstrike.com
AWS Defaults Silently Introduce New Attack Paths That Let Hackers Escalate Privilege & Account Compromise - Aqua Security researchers identified these high-risk default roles across multiple AWS services, including SageMaker, Glue, and EMR, as well as in popular open-source projects like Ray. Researchers demonstrated that simply importing a malicious model ...
1 month ago Cybersecuritynews.com
AWS CloudQuarry: Digging for Secrets in Public AMIs - Money, secrets and mass exploitation: This research unveils a quarry of sensitive data stored in public AMIs. As a best practice, AMI creators should not include credentials, including AWS account credentials, in published AMIs. We wanted to scan all ...
1 year ago Packetstormsecurity.com
CVE-2024-37293 - The AWS Deployment Framework (ADF) is a framework to manage and deploy resources across multiple AWS accounts and regions within an AWS Organization. ADF allows for staged, parallel, multi-account, cross-region deployments of applications or ...
11 months ago Tenable.com
Customer compliance and security during the post-quantum cryptographic migration | AWS Security Blog - For example, using the s2n-tls client built with AWS-LC (which supports the quantum-resistant KEMs), you could try connecting to a Secrets Manager endpoint by using a post-quantum TLS policy (for example, PQ-TLS-1-2-2023-12-15) and observe the PQ ...
7 months ago Aws.amazon.com
CVE-2021-36845 - Multiple Authenticated Stored Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in YITH Maintenance Mode (WordPress plugin) versions < 1.3.8, there are 46 vulnerable parameters that were missed by the vendor while patching the 1.3.7 version to 1.3.8. ...
3 years ago
Shaping the Future of Finance: The Cisco and AWS Collaboration in EMEA - The collaboration between Cisco and Amazon Web Services in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region-combining each company's market leading strengths-continues to deliver impressive outcomes for our customers, notably within the Financial Services ...
1 year ago Feedpress.me
AWS Root vs IAM User: What to Know & When to Use Them - In Amazon Web Services, there are two different privileged accounts. One is defined as Root User and the other is defined as an IAM User. In this blog, I will break down the differences of an AWS Root User versus an IAM account, when to use one ...
2 years ago Beyondtrust.com
SentinelLabs Details Discovery of FBot Tool for Compromising Cloud Services - SentinelLabs today published a report identifying a Python-based tool that cybercriminals are using to compromise cloud computing and software-as-a-service platforms. Alex Delamotte, senior threat researcher at SentinelLabs, said FBot is used to take ...
1 year ago Securityboulevard.com
Rundown of Security News from AWS re:Invent 2023 - Amazon Web Services has been unveiling a steady stream of announcements during its AWS re:Invent 2023 event in Las Vegas this week. The focus over the four days, as expected, is on AI as AWS strives to show that its offerings can match - or surpass - ...
1 year ago Darkreading.com
whoAMI attacks give hackers code execution on Amazon EC2 instances - The attacker only needs an AWS account to publish their backdoored AMI to the public Community AMI catalog and strategically choose a name that mimics the AMIs of their targets. The issue was fixed last year on September 19, and on December 1st AWS ...
3 months ago Bleepingcomputer.com
7 Rules to Improve AWS Security and Reduce Unwanted Incidents - Security of your AWS infrastructure is ultimately up to you. As the largest cloud services provider, AWS invests heavily to ensure its cloud environment is secure. Much of AWS security is still left to the customer, especially with regard to managing ...
2 years ago Beyondtrust.com
What Can Go Wrong with Bank Online Account Opening? - Online account opening is one of the most crucial functions for banks today. They pull out their driver's license and show it to the camera on the phone or on the PC. The bank checks some data and vets the driver's license and a new account is ...
1 year ago Securityboulevard.com
A Single Cloud Compromise Can Feed an Army of AI Sex Bots – Krebs on Security - “Once initial access was obtained, they exfiltrated cloud credentials and gained access to the cloud environment, where they attempted to access local LLM models hosted by cloud providers: in this instance, a local Claude (v2/v3) LLM model from ...
7 months ago Krebsonsecurity.com
What happens when you accidentally leak your AWS API keys? - My situation had no ill consequences, but it could have if I had used my actual email for the script or if my project was bigger and I had used AWS or another cloud provider and hardcoded those credentials. In a later class I did learn how to safely ...
1 year ago Isc.sans.edu
A Handbook for Managing Containers on Amazon Web Services - Container management is a way to help you create, govern, and maintain your containers. There are tools and services available that can automate the creation, deployment, maintenance, scaling, and monitoring of application or system containers. In ...
2 years ago Trendmicro.com
AWS Key Hunter - A Free Automated Tool to Detect Exposed AWS keys - Security teams should combine this with AWS security best practices, such as enabling CloudTrail logging for API activity monitoring, implementing IAM policies based on least-privilege principles, and rotating credentials via the AWS Secrets Manager ...
3 months ago Cybersecuritynews.com
CVE-2023-35165 - AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is an open-source software development framework to define cloud infrastructure in code and provision it through AWS CloudFormation. In the packages `aws-cdk-lib` 2.0.0 until 2.80.0 and `@aws-cdk/aws-eks` 1.57.0 ...
1 year ago
Attack Vector vs Attack Surface: The Subtle Difference - Cybersecurity discussions about "Attack vectors" and "Attack surfaces" sometimes use these two terms interchangeably. This article guides you through the distinctions between attack vectors and attack surfaces to help you better understand the two ...
2 years ago Trendmicro.com
How Hackers Interrupted GTA 5 Online Gameplay on PC - Recently, a cyber-attack on Grand Theft Auto 5 Online on PC caused an interruption to thousands of players’ gameplays. The game was completely taken offline and players couldn’t even access the main gameplay menu. The attack caused an uproar ...
2 years ago Hackread.com
How To Implementing MITRE ATT&CK In SOC Workflows - A Step-by-Step Guide - By understanding the framework, mapping your current capabilities, developing targeted detection and response strategies, and integrating ATT&CK into your tools and processes, you can build a proactive, threat-informed defense that evolves ...
1 month ago Cybersecuritynews.com
SpecterOps adds new Attack Paths to BloodHound Enterprise - SpecterOps announced updates to BloodHound Enterprise that add new Attack Paths focused on Active Directory Certificate Services. These updates make BHE the most advanced tool on the market today for securing ADCS. ADCS is the Public Key ...
1 year ago Helpnetsecurity.com