AWS Cloud Breach Achieved Admin Access In Record Time With Help From AI

As terrifying proof of how much artificial intelligence can compress the cyberattack lifecycle, researchers have documented a real-world AWS cloud intrusion that went from a simple credential leak to full administrative control in under 10 minutes.

The incident, observed by the Sysdig Threat Research Team, began when a threat actor discovered valid AWS access keys left exposed in a public Amazon S3 bucket that was ironically being used to store Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) data for the victim's own AI models. Within seconds of obtaining these credentials, the attacker deployed large language models (LLMs) to automate the heavy lifting of cloud exploitation.

What makes this breach significant is not just the speed, but the degree of AI-led decision-making. The intruder utilized LLMs to conduct rapid reconnaissance, identifying that the stolen credentials belonged to a user with limited permissions but significant access to AWS Lambda and Amazon Bedrock. Rather than manually ...