Monday,
May 25, 2026

🥖 Palette Cleanser

A CISA contractor made an oopsie, checked administrative AWS GovCloud keys into a public GitHub repo named Private-CISA (I name all my projects "secure" so hackers know not to bother) in November 2025, and left them there until an external secrets scanner caught them on May 15. The exposed credentials authenticated at high privilege to three GovCloud accounts and CISA's internal artifactory, and they were still live 48 hours after notification. If the agency whose entire reason for existence is helping orgs prevent this exact failure cannot stop it, then what we all need to be planning for the inevitable failures at our employers.

Software supply chain attacks are not slowing down. The TeamPCP npm worm hit @antv this week, Alibaba's open-source data viz suite, as part of a 323-package blast radius totaling ~16M weekly downloads. Payloads grep for AWS access keys and scrape IMDS, ECS metadata, and Secrets Manager, with parallel persistence through GitHub Actions workflows and the trojanized nrwl.angular-console VSCode extension. This is wave FIVE in the post-Shai-Hulud series after TanStack, UiPath, and Mistral, with each wave broadening the cloud-credential surface. Scope CI roles tight, kill long-lived keys in pipelines, and assume the next package update is the next wave.

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📋 Chef's selections

  • Pathfinding Labs: Deploy, test, and learn from 100+ intentionally vulnerable AWS environments by Seth Art

    Seth makes the coolest projects. Pathfinding.cloud previously documented AWS privilege escalation paths and Pathfinding Labs is the next step. A Go CLI called plabs deploys 100+ intentionally vulnerable AWS labs covering self-escalation, one-hop and multi-hop chains, cross-account scenarios, toxic combinations, and broader CSPM misconfigurations. Each lab comes with CTF-style hints and full walkthroughs. It answers a question most blue teams could not previously answer cheaply: does my CSPM and SIEM stack actually catch this path?

  • 3 prerequisites to adopting Claude Platform on AWS by Nigel Sood

    Claude has gone from niche to default in a year, and enterprises are now working out how to actually buy and govern it without spinning up a separate Anthropic relationship for every team that wants in. AWS answered that on May 11 with Claude Platform on AWS: Anthropic's full native platform (Messages API, Skills, MCP connector, managed agents, code execution, the lot) authenticated via SigV4 or API key with IAM-based access control, billed through AWS Marketplace, audited through CloudTrail, with inference still running on Anthropic-managed infrastructure outside the AWS security boundary. The article walks three controls to land before adoption. SCPs with identity allowlists restricting who can touch critical workspaces, killing long-term Anthropic API keys so SigV4-signed requests from short-lived AWS credentials are the only path in, and CloudTrail data events enabled so model invocations and agent, session, skill, and memory actions actually show up in the audit trail.

  • Unpatchable Vulnerabilities of Kubernetes: CVE-2021-25740 by Rory McCune

    CVE-2021-25740 is one of those structural Kubernetes flaws that does not get patched because the behaviour is intentional. Kubernetes lets any user with the default namespace edit role rewrite the routing table that tells a shared load balancer which pods to send traffic to (the Endpoints and EndpointSlice objects), so a regular tenant can quietly repoint another tenant's traffic at their own pods and the victim sees nothing. The post walks the routing model carefully before laying out the attack, and it is a clean read on what makes the issue structural rather than fixable. For multi-tenant EKS clusters where a shared AWS Load Balancer Controller registers pod IPs directly into ALB or NLB target groups this is live today, and the only real mitigations are avoiding shared LBs, migrating to the Gateway API which makes cross-namespace routing opt-in, and stripping that routing-table write permission off the default edit role so only Kubernetes controllers hold it.

🥗 AWS security blogs

🍛 Reddit threads on r/aws

💸 Sponsor shoutout

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🤖 Dessert

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🧁 IAM permission changes

🍪 API changes

🍹 IAM managed policy changes

☕ CloudFormation resource changes

    No resource updates this week.

🎮 Amazon Linux vulnerabilities

📺 AWS security bulletins

🚬 Security documentation changes

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