Technical analysis of AWS security incidents, blast radius patterns, and cloud attack surface insights.
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Cloud security testing decomposes into five disciplines: CSPM, CIS compliance audit, penetration test, attack path analysis, and executed blast radius assessment. Three of them reason in theory. Two of them actually walk the path. None of them is a substitute for the others, and the standards themselves say so.
An AWS security assessment is only as useful as the foothold it starts from. Pick the wrong starting identity and you get a graph of paths nobody would ever walk. Pick the right one and you get the breach an attacker would actually run. Here's what to look for.
Vercel's April 2026 breach is the third major PaaS-credential incident in four years. Heroku, CircleCI, and Vercel all followed the same shape: a vendor-side endpoint compromise that ended in customer AWS keys being exported in bulk. The platform changes. The mechanic does not.
AWS launched its autonomous penetration testing agent. It finds XSS, SQLi, and application-layer vulnerabilities. It doesn't map your IAM blast radius. These are two different problems, and your environment probably has both.
766 hosts compromised. 196 sets of AWS credentials stolen. One operator with a search engine for your secrets. The UAT-10608 campaign isn't an outlier. It's the new baseline for how attackers harvest cloud credentials at scale.
TeamPCP didn't attack AWS to steal AWS credentials. They compromised a CI pipeline and waited for the credentials to come to them. The campaign that hit Trivy, LiteLLM, and Checkmarx in 8 days reveals something important about where your AWS keys actually rest.
We read every AWS security bulletin from the last six months. The recurring theme isn't buffer overflows or cryptographic flaws. It's trust boundary failures that turn minor permissions into full privilege escalation.
We analyzed 1,169 AWS-related HackerOne reports. The dominant pattern: SSRF or leaked credentials become full infrastructure access because nobody measured the blast radius of the compromised identity.
For years, predictable S3 bucket names let attackers squat resources and hijack AWS services. Account-regional namespaces, launched March 2026, eliminate the entire attack class. Here's what changed and what you need to do.
A single ECS task role with read access to every secret in the account. The LexisNexis breach is a textbook case of why blast radius validation matters.
In 2019, a single SSRF vulnerability turned into 106 million stolen records. AWS shipped IMDSv2. Seven years later, half of EC2 instances still don't enforce it, and attackers have industrialized the technique.