Monday,
January 19, 2026

๐Ÿฅ– Palette Cleanser

This week's chef's selection is some of the best cloud hacking content you'll ever read. Both issues are now fixed, but the hacks were so elegant you need to see them anyway. No assembly, no extravagant exploits. Just busted logic and doing what it takes. Easy-to-follow explanations too. What a start to 2026!

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๐Ÿ“‹ Chef's selections

  • CodeBreach: Infiltrating the AWS Console Supply Chain and Hijacking AWS GitHub Repositories via CodeBuild by Yuval Avrahami and Nir Ohfeld

    This is such epic hacking. Yuval and Nir found that AWS CodeBuild's webhook filters used unanchored regex to validate GitHub user IDs, meaning 12345 would match any ID containing those digits. Since GitHub assigns sequential IDs, researchers could wait for a new account to "eclipse" a trusted maintainer's ID as a substring. They timed 200 simultaneous GitHub App creations to snag the right ID, submitted a malicious PR, and extracted the aws-sdk-js-automation token, which had push access to the SDK used in 66% of cloud environments.

  • Unauth AWS ROSA Cluster Takeover by Ryan Gerstenkorn

    If the CodeBuild thing was epic, this hack is elegant. ROSA is AWS's managed Red Hat OpenShift service, and Red Hat's cluster transfer API at api.openshift.com had a classic oopsie. It verified recipients could accept clusters but never checked whether the requester actually owned what they were transferring. An unauthenticated attacker could grab any cluster's UUID from its public endpoint, submit a transfer request, and own someone else's production Kubernetes cluster within 24 hours. From there, Ryan used some more magic to turn cluster-admin into access to AWS accounts.

  • AWS federated identity access to Azure by Paul Schwarzenberger

    Paul saved us from having only hacking content. AWS's new Outbound Identity Federation from re:Invent 2025 lets you ditch stored Azure credentials entirely. Your AWS IAM role calls aws sts get-web-identity-token, gets a JWT, and uses it to az login with an Entra ID app registration that trusts your AWS token issuer. The walkthrough shows a Lambda accessing Azure Storage blobs without a secret in sight.

๐Ÿฅ— AWS security blogs

๐Ÿ› Reddit threads on r/aws


๐Ÿ’ธ Sponsor shoutout

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๐Ÿค– Dessert

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

๐Ÿง IAM permission changes

๐Ÿช API changes

๐Ÿน IAM managed policy changes

โ˜• CloudFormation resource changes

    No resource updates this week.

๐ŸŽฎ Amazon Linux vulnerabilities

๐Ÿ“บ AWS security bulletins

๐Ÿšฌ Security documentation changes

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