Monday,
September 08, 2025

🥖 Palette Cleanser

Somehow it's 28°C (82°F) and sunny today in Sydney after months of cold and rain. I'm excited to be spending it writing for you, my wonderful subscribers.

This week we had another public example of how attackers can end up rummaging around in your AWS environment. We have to take some minor leaps because not all the details are public, but according to the Salesloft breach disclosure, an attacker started with access to their GitHub account. They abused that to get credentials into AWS, and then grabbed more from there, eventually making a trip back to "Drift customers’ technology integrations." Mandiant published more details about the threat actor's (UNC6395) general activities, but my takeaway is attackers don't mind jumping up and down the tech stack.

Last call for fwd:cloudsec EU tickets, as the conference runs September 15-16 in Berlin. Many of the researchers I regularly feature here will be speaking, so it's worth making the trek.

Have feedback about AWS Security Digest? Tell us here. This issue is also available to share online.

📋 Chef's selections

  • Credential Exfiltration Paths in AWS Code Interpreters by Nigel Sood

    Many compute resources in Bedrock AgentCore (including code interpreters) run on Firecracker MicroVMs, which can be configured to use the MicroVM Metadata Service. With minimal effort, Nigel wrote code to pull the execution role creds. According to AWS, this is expected behavior, but it feels like an insecure default that’s going to get people rekt.

  • Simulating Ransomware with AWS KMS by Alexis Obeng

    We've covered KMS ransomware plenty in past ASD issues, but how do you test your preparedness? This post walks through simulating an attacker by creating an EXTERNAL origin KMS key, importing your own key material, re-encrypting RDS snapshots or EBS volumes, and then deleting that material to see how your environment reacts. It’s a practical lab guide that gives you the exact IAM permissions and AWS CLI steps needed to safely rehearse the scenario.

  • GCP Workload Identity Federation with AWS ECS Tasks by Abhishek Agarwal

    GCP Workload Identity Federation lets AWS workloads authenticate to GCP without long-lived keys, but the google-auth libraries only support EC2 out of the box. On ECS tasks, WIF breaks because the config hardcodes EC2 metadata, so you need either a custom AWS credential supplier or a workaround that sets ECS task credentials in environment variables. The post walks through both approaches with code samples and Terraform.

Bonus: From Compromised Keys to Phishing Campaigns: Inside a Cloud Email Service Takeover

🥗 AWS security blogs

🍛 Reddit threads on r/aws

💸 Sponsor shoutout

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🤖 Dessert

Dessert is made by robots, for those that enjoy the industrial content.

🧁 IAM permission changes

🍪 API changes

🍹 IAM managed policy changes

☕ CloudFormation resource changes

🎮 Amazon Linux vulnerabilities

📺 AWS security bulletins

    No bulletins this week.

🚬 Security documentation changes

    No bulletins this week.

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