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Background

Cloud security must be threat-informed. This repository compiles public data on security incidents impacting AWS customers, to guide prioritized security investment.

This repository seeks to index all publicly disclosed AWS customer security incidents with a known root cause.

It will exclude incidents involving exposed data stores (e.g S3 bucket leaks, exposed managed or hosted databases). Those incidents are already well understood, and examples can be found cataloged in places like nagwww's s3-leaks repo, upguard's reports, hackmeggedon's annual rollup reports (2022) and Corey Quinn's LWIAWS S3 Bucket Negligence Award.

A Note on Blameless Postmortems

This repository is in no way intended as a criticism of the listed companies. In the spirit of blameless postmortems 1, our goal is to learn from incidents without an atmosphere of blame.

Catalog of AWS Customer Security Incidents

A repository of breaches of AWS customers

Name Date Root Cause Escalation Vector(s) Impact Link to details
Uber 2014, May Github Gist (data analysis script) with AWS credentials N/A 50,000 records, including names and driver’s licenses from S3 hosted database prunes Exclusive: In lawsuit over hacking, Uber probes IP address assigned to Lyft exec - sources , A blameless post-mortem of USA v. Joseph Sullivan
Code Spaces 2014, June AWS Console Credentials (Phishing?) Attacker created additional accounts/access keys Wiped S3 buckets, EC2 instances, AMIs, EBS snapshots Hacker puts code spaces out of business
BrowserStack 2014, November Shellshock on exposed, outdated prototype machine Access keys on server, used to create IAM user, create EC2, and mount backup Steal user data and email users BrowserStack analysis
DNC Hack by the GRU 2016, June Unknown, test clusters breached EC2 Snapshots copied to attacker AWS accounts Tableau and Vertica Queries DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE v. THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
DataDog 2016, July CI/CD AWS access key and SSH private key leaked Attacker attempted to pivot with customer credentials 3 EC2 instances and subset of S3 buckets 2016-07-08 Security Notice
Uber 2016, October ~13 Hacked Uber credentials purchased for forum gave access to private Github Repo with AWS credentials N/A Names and driver’s license numbers of 600k drivers, PII of 57 million users in unencrypted manual backup Uber concealed cyberattack ..., A blameless post-mortem of USA v. Joseph Sullivan
Lynda.com 2016, December Private Github Repo with AWS credentials N/A User data for 9.5m users, attempted extortion 2 Plead Guilty in 2016 Uber and Lynda.com Hacks
OneLogin 2017, May AWS keys Created EC2 instances Accessed database tables (with encrypted data) May 31, 2017 Security Incident
Politifact 2017, October "Misconfigured cloud computing server" N/A Coinhive cryptojacking Hackers have turned Politifact’s website into a trap for your PC
Dataspline 2017, Unknown Monero miner in container base image dependency N/A Monero cryptojacking LinkedIn post from co-founder
DXC Technologies 2017, November Private AWS key exposed via Github 244 EC2 instance started Cryptomining DXC spills AWS private keys on public GitHub
Drizly 2018 AWS Credentials committed to public github repo N/A Cryptojacking FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION - Drizly Complaint
LA Times 2018, February S3 global write access N/A Cryptojacking Coinhive cryptojacking added to homicide.latimes.com
Tesla 2018, February Globally exposed Kubernetes console, Pod with AWS credentials N/A Cryptojacking Hack Brief: Hackers Enlisted Tesla's Public Cloud to Mine Cryptocurrency
Chegg 2018, April Former contractor abuses broadly shared root credential Unknown 40 million users' data (from S3 bucket) FTC Complaint
imToken 2018, June Email account compromise Reset AWS account password Minimal customer device data Disclosure of Security Incidents on imToken
Voova 2019, March Stolen credentials by former employee N/A Deleted 23 servers Sacked IT guy annihilates 23 of his ex-employer’s AWS servers
Capital One 2019, April "Misconfigured WAF" that allowed for a SSRF attack Over-privileged EC2 Role 100 million credit applications A Technical Analysis of the Capital One Cloud Misconfiguration Breach
JW Player 2019, September Weave Scope (publicly exposed), RCE by design N/A Cryptojacking How A Cryptocurrency Miner Made Its Way onto Our Internal Kubernetes Clusters
Malindo Air 2019, September Former employee insider threat N/A 35 million PII records Malindo Air: Data Breach Was Inside Job
Imperva 2019, October “Internal compute instance” globally accessible, “Contained” AWS API key N/A RDS snapshot stolen Imperva Security Update
Cameo 2020, February Credentials in mobile app package N/A Access to backend infrastructure, including user data Celeb Shout-Out App Cameo Exposes Private Videos and User Data
Open Exchange Rates 2020, March Third-party compromise exposing access key N/A User database Exchange rate service’s customer details hacked via AWS
First Republic Bank 2020, March Fired employee incompletely offboarded N/A System interruption First Republic Bank
Live Auctioneers 2020, July Compromised third party software granting access to cloud environment N/A User database, including MD5 hashed credentials Washington State OAG - Live Auctioneers
Twilio 2020, July S3 global write access N/A Magecart2 Incident Report: TaskRouter JS SDK Security Incident
Natures Basket responsible disclosure 2020, July Hard-coded root keys in source code exposed via public S3 bucket N/A N/A GotRoot! AWS root Account Takeover
Drizly 2020, July Inactive Github account compromised via reused password, granting AWS credential access in source code N/A RDS Instance with 2.5 million users data exfiltrated FTC Takes Action Against Drizly and its CEO James Cory Rellas for Security Failures that Exposed Data of 2.5 Million Consumers
Cryptomining AMI 2020, August Windows 2008 Server Community AMI N/A Monero miner Cryptominer Found Embedded in AWS Community AMI
Animal Jam 2020, November Slack compromise exposes AWS credentials N/A User database Kids' gaming website Animal Jam breached
Cisco 2020, December Former employee with AWS access 5 months post-resignation N/A Deleted ~450 EC2 instances Former Cisco engineer sentenced to prison
Juspay 2021, January Compromised old, unrecycled Amazon Web Services (AWS) access key N/A Masked card data, email IDs and phone numbers Data from August Breach of Amazon Partner Juspay Dumped Online
20/20 Eye Care Network and Hearing Care Network 2021, January Compromised credential N/A S3 buckets accessed then deleted 20/20 Eye Care Network and Hearing Care Network notify 3,253,822 health plan members of breach that deleted contents of AWS buckets
Sendtech 2021, February (Current or former employee) Compromised credentials Created additional admin account Accessed customer data in S3 PERSONAL DATA PROTECTION COMMISSION Case No. DP-2102-B7884
LogicGate 2021, April Compromised credentials N/A Backup files in S3 stolen Risk startup LogicGate confirms data breach
Ubiquiti 2021, April Compromised credentials from IT employee Lastpass (alleged former employee insider threat) N/A root administrator access to all AWS accounts, extortion Ubiquiti All But Confirms Breach Response Iniquity
Uran Company 2021, July Compromised Drupal with API keys N/A Cryptomining Clear and Uncommon Story About Overcoming Issues With AWS
reddoorz.com 2021, September Access Key leaked via APK N/A Customer database stolen PERSONAL DATA PROTECTION COMMISSION Case No. DP-2009-B7057
HPE Aruba 2021, October Unknown exposure of Access Key N/A Potential access to network telemetry and contact trace data Aruba Central Security Incident
Kaspersky 2021, November Compromised SES token from third party N/A Phishing attacks Kaspersky's stolen Amazon SES token used in Office 365 phishing
Eye Care Leaders 2021, December Unknown Unknown deleted databases and system configuration files, potential theft of 1.5M patient records Augusta University Health - Breach Disclosure [PDF]
Onus 2021, December Log4Shell vulnerability in Cyclos server AmazonS3FullAccess creds (and DB creds) in Cyclos config 2 million ONUS users’ information including EKYC data, personal information, and password hash was leaked. The attack on ONUS – A real-life case of the Log4Shell vulnerability
Flexbooker 2021, December Unknown Unknown 3.7M first and last names, email addresses, phone numbers, "encrypted" passwords Booking management platform FlexBooker leaks 3.7 million user records
npm 2022, April Third party OAuth token compromise granting private repository access, containing AWS keys Unknown 100k users data (from 2015) npm security update: Attack campaign using stolen OAuth tokens
PREMINT 2022, July S3 global write access Unknown NFT Theft (supply chain) Full Analysis of the PREMINT Attack Incident
Uber 2022, September Contractor account compromise leading to AWS credential discovery on a shared drive Unknown N/A Uber - Security update
Lastpass 2022, October Stole source code and accessed development environment via compromised developer account (an IAM User) Unknown pivot point into production environment. Later compromise of a privileged engineer's personal machine to gain access to decryption keys for stolen data Internal and customer data broadly compromised, including backups of MFA database Notice of Recent Security Incident,Incident 2 – Additional details of the attack, Breaking the Vault: A Case Study of the 2022 LastPass Data Breach
Medibank 2022, October Compromised credentials Unknown Data exfiltration from Redshift / "Ransomware" Medibank now says hackers accessed all its customers’ personal data, Amazon Redshift gets new default settings to prevent data breaches
Sonder 2022, November Unknown Unknown Theft of customer information, attempted extortion Security Update, Breach Notification
Teqtivity (Uber Vendor) 2022, December Unknown Unknown "AWS backup server" with device and user information Breach Notification Statement, Uber suffers new data breach after attack on vendor, info leaked online
CommuteAir 2023, January Publicly Exposed Jenkins with hardcoded credentials N/A 2019 FAA No Fly List how to completely own an airline in 3 easy steps, U.S. airline accidentally exposes ‘No Fly List’ on unsecured server
Cloudflare 2023, November Pivot from Okta compromise due to un-rotated access token N/A N/A Cloudflare - Thanksgiving 2023 security incident
Sisense 2024, April Credentials stolen from Gitlab repository N/A Terabytes of customer data exfiltrated from S3 Why CISA is Warning CISOs About a Breach at Sisense
pcTattletale 2024, May Application vulnerability disclosed root AWS keys N/A Data published publicly Spyware app pcTattletale was hacked and its website defaced, defaced site
BeyondTrust 2024, December 0day vulnerability in a 3p application infrastructure API key to pivot cross-account Customer Instances compromised BeyondTrust Remote Support SaaS Service Security Investigation
TinaCloud 2024, December Credentials leaked in JS file N/A SES abuse for phishing TinaCloud: Public Disclosure of Security Breach
Otelier 2025, January Infostealer Credentials found in Bitbucket 8TB of data exfiltrated from S3 Otelier data breach exposes info, hotel reservations of millions
Bybit / Safe{Wallet} 2025, February Compromised developer machine Malicious JavaScript via S3 bucket write access $1.5 Billion dollars stolen Bybit Interim Investigation Reports
AngelOne 2025, March Unknown N/A Data exfiltration Indian Stock Broker Angel One Discloses Data Breach
Pearson 2025, March Exposed GitLab token in .git/config AWS credentials in source code Data exfiltration Education giant Pearson hit by cyberattack exposing customer data
KiranaPro 2025, June Former employee, post layoff N/A Service disruption Indian grocery startup KiranaPro was hacked and its servers deleted, CEO confirms, KiranaPro Crisis Explained: Ex-Employee’s Revenge Move that Paralysed the App

Vendor-reported AWS Customer Security Incident Case Studies

Report Date Root Cause Escalation or Peristence Vector(s) Impact Link to details
Mandiant M-Trends 2020 2020, February Credentials stolen from GitHub repository commit history Takes snapshot of EBS volumes, creates EC2 instances, exfiltrates data over SSH Stolen EBS volumes M-Trends 2020
TeamTNT Worm 2020, April Misconfigured Docker & k8s platforms Steals AWS credentials from ~/.aws/* Cryptojacking for Monero Team TNT – The First Crypto-Mining Worm to Steal AWS Credentials, TeamTNT with new campaign aka “Chimaera”
Expel case study 1 2020, April 8 IAM access keys compromised Backdoored security groups Command line access to EC2 instances Finding evil in AWS: A key pair to remember
Expel case study 2 2020, July Root IAM user access keycompromised SSH keys generated for EC2 instances Cryptojacking Behind the scenes in the Expel SOC: Alert-to-fix in AWS
Mandiant: Insider Threat Scenario 2020, September Fired employee uses credentials Access CI/CD server, create a new user, steal credentials Deleted production databases Cloud Breaches: Case Studies, Best Practices, and Pitfalls
FireEye M-Trends 2021 case study 2021, April Use of SSH key by former employee Creates users and EC2 instances Deleted RDS backups M-Trends 2021
DarkLab case study 2021, July Jenkins RCE Create IAM users, use S3 Browser tool Use environment to launch scanning, nuked account Trouble in Paradise
Expel case study 3 2022, April Credentials in publicly available code repository AttachUserPolicy used for privesc Cryptojacking (prevented) Incident report: From CLI to console, chasing an attacker in AWS
Permiso case study 1 2022, June Gitlab vulnerability (CVE-2021-22205) Credentials on the system found, used to create a backup user Cryptojacking Anatomy of an Attack: Exposed keys to Crypto Mining
Clearvector case study 2022, August ADFS pivot into IAM Identity Center N/A N/A Auditing identity activity for NOBELIUM and MagicWeb in AWS
Positive Thinking Company case study 2022, June Unknown N/A Cryptojacking Mitigating a crypto jacking incident on an AWS machine from the earliest stages
Palo Alto Unit 42 2022, December Code execution in Lambda context Exfiltrate credentials from envvars SES abuse for phishing Compromised Cloud Compute Credentials: Case Studies From the Wild
Permiso case study 2 2022, December Exploit publicly facing software, mainly Jupyter notebooks or k8s N/A Credential Theft Cloud Cred Harvesting Campaign - Grinch Edition
Crowdstrike 2022, December Exploit known ForgeRock CVE aws_consoler used to obtain pivot to console sessions without MFA N/A Analysis of an Intrusion Campaign Targeting Telco and BPO Companies
Expel case study 4 2023, January Publicly exposed Postman server with access key credentials stored in the project’s variables N/A (likely) AWS SES abuse (prevented) Incident report: stolen AWS access keys
Cado Security and Invictus Incident Response 2023, January N/A Responding to an attack in AWS, Part 2
AWS 2023, February Key disclosure, or SSRF N/A N/A The anatomy of ransomware event targeting data residing in Amazon S3
Sysdig 2023, February Exploit public facing k8s service IAM creds in Lambda env vars and in S3 bucket Data exfiltration SCARLETEEL: Operation leveraging Terraform, Kubernetes, and AWS for data theft
Invictus IR 2023, April exposed long-term credentials CreateUser data exfiltration and deletion with ransom note Ransomware in the cloud
Unit 42 2023, April sim-swap grants access to 10 access keys in source code CreateUser with increased permissions data exfiltration and deletion with ransom note From SIM-Swap to Data Leak on the Dark Web
Unit 42 2023, April SSRF via known CVE and IMDSv1 Backdoored IAM role Cryptojacking, outbound DDOS From Misconfigured Firewall to Cryptojacking Botnet
Mitiga (RSAC) #1 2023, April Company repository w/ AWS keys merged to personal github N/A N/A It’s Getting Real & Hitting the Fan: 2023 Edition
Mitiga (RSAC) #2 2023, April Unknown root cause of access key compromise N/A Shared AMIs publicly for exfil It’s Getting Real & Hitting the Fan: 2023 Edition
Kroll #1 2023, April Third party compromised N/A Redirect DNS and Email Effective AWS Incident Response: Examples and Recommendations
Kroll #2 2023, April Internal network compromised Lateral movement into cloud, years of persistence Data Exfiltration Effective AWS Incident Response: Examples and Recommendations
S2W Talon "Donjuji" 2023, May Development server with exposed environment variables containing IAM user credentials N/A Stole data from S3 Detailed Analysis of CloudDon, Cloud Data Breach of Korea e-commerce company
Checkmarx 2023, June S3 bucket serving npm package bignum hijacked N/A Credential theft Hijacking S3 Buckets: New Attack Technique Exploited in the Wild by Supply Chain Attackers
SentinelOne 2023, June CVE-2022-47986 N/A N/A Anatomy of a Cloud Incident | SentinelOne’s Vigilance vs. IceFire Ransomware
Sysdig 2023, July Exploit public facing Jupyter Notebook in k8s IAM creds, including via IMDSv2. Privilege escalation via IAM misconfiguration. Access key persistence Cryptojacking SCARLETEEL 2.0: Fargate, Kubernetes, and Crypto
CrowdStrike 2023, August Exploiting RCE in a custom PHP web application IAM creds, including via IMDS. Lateral movement via SSM Unknown 2023 Threat Hunting Report
CrowdStrike 2023, August web application exploit attempts to query IMDS and connect laterally Unknown 2023 Cloud Risk Report
Unit42 2023, August Exploiting SugarCRM zero day Access keys on EC2 hosts, Pacu + Scoutsuite scanning DB data exfiltration When a Zero Day and Access Keys Collide in the Cloud: Responding to the SugarCRM Zero-Day Vulnerability
AWS 2023, August Compromise of federated user via unknown means Access keys on EC2 hosts, Pacu + Scoutsuite scanning DB data exfiltration Two real-life examples of why limiting permissions works: Lessons from AWS CIRT - Story 1: On the hunt for credentials
AWS 2023, August RCE via unintentionally exposed port in ECS task definition N/A Cryptojacking Two real-life examples of why limiting permissions works: Lessons from AWS CIRT - Story 2: More instances for crypto mining
Security Joes 2023, Sep Exploited a vulnerable version of MinIO on an AWS EC2 instance via evil_minIO Network reconnaissance, create windows accounts Unknown New Attack Vector In The Cloud: Attackers caught exploiting Object Storage Services
Unit42 2023, Oct Credentials exposed on Github Create EC2 instances Monero Cryptojacking CloudKeys in the Air: Tracking Malicious Operations of Exposed IAM Keys
Reliaquest 2023, Nov Spearphishing Hijacked Citrix VDI Data theft (lastpass export in S3 bucket) Scattered Spider Attack Analysis
Datadog #1 2024, January Leaked IAM User Key created administrator IAM user S3 data exfiltration, attempted cryptomining Tales from the cloud trenches: Amazon ECS is the new EC2 for crypto mining
Datadog #2 2024, January Leaked IAM User Key N/A Cryptomining (via ECS Fargate, XMRig) Tales from the cloud trenches: Amazon ECS is the new EC2 for crypto mining
Invictus IR 2024, January Exposed IAM User (Administrator) Access Key created administrator IAM user, added access keys for existing users, created externally assumable role Cryptomining, SES spam/phishing, phishing infrastructure (domains) The curious case of DangerDev@protonmail.me
Stephen Berger (InfoGuardAG) 2024, February Unknown N/A S3 Ransomware (deleted buckets) AWS Ransomware
Sysdig 2024, March Exploited vulnerable Laravel + Wordpress N/A Meson CDN cryptomining Cloud Threats deploying Crypto CDN
Datadog 2024, March Compromised Credentials N/A AWS SNS SMS Phishing Tales from the cloud trenches: Using malicious AWS activity to spot phishing campaigns
Mandiant 2024, April Phishing leads to compromise of credentials in former employee's personal Google Drive N/A S3 data exfiltration and "Ransomware" (deleted buckets) Cloud compromises: Lessons learned from Mandiant investigations in 2023 - Incident Response Case Study #4
Sysdig 2024, May Exploited known vulnerable Laravel (CVE-2021-3129) N/A LLMJacking LLMjacking: Stolen Cloud Credentials Used in New AI Attack
Lacework 2024, June Stolen or compromised credentials Create new console user LLMJacking Detecting AI resource-hijacking with Composite Alerts
Datadog 2024, June Stolen or compromised credentials N/A LLMJacking Tales from the cloud trenches: Raiding for AWS vaults, buckets and secrets
Yotam Meitar (Wiz) 2024, June Compromised vulnerable application (k8s Pod) Exploit overprivileged secrets access to retrieve IDP-related credentials S3 data exfiltration and "Ransomware" Responding to Sophisticated Ransom Attacks in the Cloud: A Real-World Case Study
Rapid7 #1 2024, July Compromised credential Create SES user and KMS key Data Exfiltration & Distruction Cloud Attack Paths Unveiled: Lessons Learned from the SOC
Rapid7 #2 2024, July Compromised credential in public s3 Create IAM users with SES access SES Abuse Cloud Attack Paths Unveiled: Lessons Learned from the SOC
Unit42 2024, August Exposed AWS credentials N/A S3 data exfiltration and extortion Bling Libra’s Tactical Evolution: The Threat Actor Group Behind ShinyHunters Ransomware
Wiz 2024, September Infostealer deployed via social engineering VDP session hijack, RDP to server in cloud, extract AWS access keys Data exfiltration Uncovering Hybrid Cloud Attacks Part 2 – The Attack
Permiso 2024, October Stolen or compromised credentials N/A LLMJacking When AI Gets Hijacked: Exploiting Hosted Models for Dark Roleplaying
Datadog 2024, December Stolen or compromised credentials Create new role assumable by attacker account Targeting SES Tales from the cloud trenches: Unwanted visitor
Wiz 2024, December Stolen or compromised credentials Create new users and access keys LLMJacking New Developments in LLM Hijacking Activity
Sygnia 2025, January Infostealer deployed via social engineering Lambda PrivEsc to execute commands on EC2 instance "API calls" to "critical assets" Sygnia’s 2025 Field Report
Expel 2025, February Phishing/Smishing compromising Okta identities N/A N/A Expel's 2025 Annual Threat Report - Scattered Spider
Badshah 2025, April Stolen or compromised credentials N/A Exfiltration and deletion Securing a SaaS Company's AWS Environment After a Breach
Mandiant M-Trends 2025 2025, April Stolen or compromised credentials N/A Mining, LLMJacking, Resale M-Trends 2025: TRIPLESTRENGTH Leverages Stolen Credentials for Cloud Assets for Illicit Cryptocurrency Mining
Datadog 2025, March Leaked credentials Create Admin IAM Users, Lambda persistence, AWS SSO Persistence N/A Tales from the cloud trenches: The Attacker doth persist too much, methinks
Darktrace #1 2025, July Compromised credentials RDP connections to other instances Data Exfiltration Defending the Cloud: Stopping Cyber Threats in Azure and AWS with Darktrace
Darktrace #2 2025, July SonicWall N/A Data Exfiltration Defending the Cloud: Stopping Cyber Threats in Azure and AWS with Darktrace
Google Cloud Threat Horizons UNC4899 Case 2025, July Malware via job opportunity premise Session cookie theft, CloudFront & S3 JS modification Cryptocurrency theft GCAT Threat Horizons H2 2025

Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure

Note: There have been numerous identified incidents of Magecart exploiting S3 Global Write - in one review targeting "well over 17,000 domains"

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