Protecting Your AWS Infrastructure: Understanding the Risks

When it comes to securing your AWS infrastructure, the impact of vulnerabilities can be severe, especially when it comes to sensitive data stored in services like CloudFormation. CloudFormation, an infrastructure-as-code tool, stores templates that are automatically deployed to define infrastructure stacks, containing valuable information like environment variables and credentials.

However, the danger escalates when attackers exploit vulnerabilities to inject backdoors into these templates. A malicious code snippet hidden in a template can execute unauthorized actions in the user’s account, such as creating new admin roles that can be utilized by the attacker.

Predictable S3 Bucket Names: A Security Concern

While the CloudFormation attack hinges on leaked S3 bucket names stored in repositories, other AWS services pose additional risks with predictable naming conventions. For instance, AWS EMR generates S3 buckets using the pattern aws-emr-studio-[account-ID]-[region], while AWS SageMaker follows the sagemaker-[region]-[account-ID] format.