One of the best ways to lower your AWS bill by 99 percent or more is by not checking your keys into public GitHub repositories. Many of us have done this inadvertently over the years, and the defenses against it have improved dramatically (my personal favorite being "using non-ephemeral credentials derived from OIDC or SSO is an anti-pattern"), but it still happens. On Friday, BleepingComputer reported on a Truffle Security finding that hundreds of leaked AWS keys are root keys and are somehow still active and valid. AWS Security is full of very smart people who care deeply about a number of things, including "not abetting crime." If they detect (usually via automated means) that a credential has been leaked, they're quick to apply a Quarantine Policy to it. Trouble is, that policy enumerates a bunch of bad behaviors in an ever-expanding graph of principals and associated behaviors. AWS' considered position on this is that they don't want to break customer environments: "The policy aims to limit the potential damage that may be caused by fraud-related activity leading to unauthorized charges, while not impacting the existing resources." AWS' considered position on this is wrong. If I get access to your credentials (much less a root credential, good god), deactivating them may very well break your workload because anything that relies on those credentials will start failing. Until you rotate them, those workloads will continue to fail. That's not good! But I promise you, as a bad actor, I can do far worse to you. Hold my tea Go ahead and apply a quarantine policy to a credential set and toss it my way. I won't be able to buy savings plans, read your S3 data, modify Lambda functions, and do a host of other things. But here's what I can do. Anything I damn well feel like on RDS. You don't have anything important in databases, right? ssm:SendCommand / ssm:StartSession are permitted, which means I can run commands as root on EC2 instances, which will in turn invoke with that instance role’s permissions. sts:AssumeRole means that I can assume any other role in the account and get its permissions, rendering the entire restriction list potentially moot. I can use autoscaling:CreateAutoScalingGroup / UpdateAutoScalingGroup to launch instances via the Auto Scaling service-linked role, so the ec2:RunInstances deny never applies. cloudtrail:LookupEvents gets denied (that'll stop you from... reading the audit log), but I can call both cloudtrail:StopLogging and DeleteTrail which do exactly what you expect; you don't have an audit log anymore. SES denies ses:GetSendQuota / ListIdentities actions, but y'know what's missing? SendEmail, so I can blast my spam out to your entire list. sns:GetSMSAttributes means I can't get your SMS configuration, but I can absolutely sns:Publish to send fraudulent text messages wherever I'd like. s3:DeleteObject gets denied, but s3:PutObject is allowed. I can't delete your data, but I can fill a bucket to petabytes. Next, they fail to block s3:PutBucketVersioning, s3:PutObjectLockConfiguration, s3:PutObjectRetention, and s3:PutObjectLegalHold. So on any existing bucket, like that one I just stuffed petabytes into, I can enable versioning, turn on Object Lock, and set a bucket-default COMPLIANCE-mode retention out to 2126, or alternatively slap it on per object. COMPLIANCE retention can't be shortened or removed by anyone, including the account root and AWS Support. The only way to remove it is to delete the entire AWS account. secretsmanager:GetSecretValue, ssm:GetParameter* (WithDecryption), and kms:Decrypt are all unencumbered, so your secrets are now my secrets. Sharing is good! Backups are important, so it's a shame you don't have any. Well, not after I kick off backup:DeleteRecoveryPoint / DeleteBackupVault, and rds:DeleteDBSnapshot. If you're using CloudFormation, and for some things you almost certainly are, cloudformation:DeleteStack going unmentioned means you're not using it anymore and all of your stacks are gone. I would make different choices This isn't a comprehensive list - just a few things that occurred to me over the course of about an hour. I'm not a bad actor; I'm almost positive that I'm missing a whole bunch. AWS is almost certainly going to change this. My question for them is simply, "how big of a customer incident needs to happen before you do?" ®

CISA has ordered US federal agencies to patch two exploited flaws in TrueConf, a Russian-built video conferencing platform, after compromised servers were caught handing malware to unsuspecting meeting participants. The US cybersecurity agency on Thursday added CVE-2026-72529 and CVE-2026-72530 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, saying both have been used in real-world attacks. What CISA doesn't say is who is being attacked, or where. The only publicly documented attacks exploiting these two bugs so far come from Kaspersky, which linked them to Head Mare, a pro-Ukrainian hacktivist group that has repeatedly gone after Russian organizations. Its latest campaign targeted Russian companies across industries including transport, energy, electronics, IT, and software development. CISA doesn't say whether it added the flaws to KEV because of those attacks or because it has evidence of exploitation elsewhere, potentially including against organizations in the US. That question is particularly interesting given what TrueConf is and who uses it. TrueConf is a Moscow-based maker of video conferencing software that offers an on-premises alternative to cloud services such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Organizations can run TrueConf Server on their own infrastructure, including in private networks, giving them control over where their calls and associated data go. While the company's roots and much of its customer base are Russian, TrueConf has users worldwide. It says it has users in its portfolio that include Switzerland’s Department of Justice and Home Affairs, Istanbul Airport, and a news org, which The Reg has contacted to confirm. Most of the customer success stories are dated before 2022. Used together, the two bugs flagged by CISA can give an attacker control of the underlying server. According to Kaspersky, an unauthenticated attacker with network access to TCP port 4307, which TrueConf documentation says is open by default, can exploit the first flaw to run a malicious script. The second flaw lets the attacker break out of the isolated environment where the script runs and execute arbitrary code on the underlying server. Kaspersky says Head Mare used that access to plant a web shell, move through victims' infrastructure, and gain privileged access to the TrueConf database. From there, the attackers replaced the legitimate TrueConf Windows client installer on compromised servers with a trojanized version carrying the PhantomCore backdoor. Kaspersky warns that this creates a risk beyond organizations actually running vulnerable TrueConf servers. Employees joining conferences hosted by suppliers or other third parties could potentially download a compromised client from someone else's hacked infrastructure. The researcher says the flaws affect TrueConf Server releases going back to 2022. TrueConf shipped fixes in versions 5.3.9, 5.4.9 and 5.5.5 on June 18, warning customers that skipping the update could leave their conferencing systems exposed to attacks over the public internet. That doesn't mean every TrueConf box is sitting on the internet waiting to be popped. Exploitation requires network access to the vulnerable service, so a server confined to an internal network would not be directly reachable from outside unless an attacker had another route in. Federal agencies have until September 10 to patch the flaws. Other TrueConf admins can take their time, as long as they're comfortable with a conferencing server potentially moonlighting as a malware distribution point. ®

Hackers slipped malware into several popular Rust packages this week, turning routine software builds into a route onto developers' machines. The Rust Security Response Team disclosed the supply chain attack on Thursday after receiving a tip about a crate called proc-macro1. An investigation found that its build script fetched malware from a remote server. The attack extended beyond a single dodgy crate. Someone had published a new version of arrayref, a legitimate and widely used Rust package, with proc-macro1 added as a dependency. The attacker had also yanked recent legitimate releases of arrayref, helping steer users toward the poisoned release. The Rust team does not believe arrayref's maintainer was responsible. It suspects the developer's computer or credentials were compromised and locked the account while attempting to contact them. The attacker also published malicious versions of two other crates maintained by the same developer, internment and append-only-vec. The poisoned releases weren't around for long. Arrayref 0.3.10 was available on crates.io for 86 minutes, internment 0.8.7 for 90 minutes, and append-only-vec 0.1.9 for 107 minutes before they were removed. That's a narrow window, but arrayref is hardly some forgotten package gathering dust in the registry. Security firm Aikido, which separately analyzed the attack, puts arrayref at roughly 245 million lifetime downloads and append-only-vec at more than 4 million. However, those figures don't tell us how many developers pulled the malicious versions during the brief period they were live. Aikido found that the attacker largely left the legitimate source code untouched, adding only a dependency on proc-macro1, a typosquat of the legitimate proc-macro2 package. The malicious code was tucked inside proc-macro1's build.rs file. Cargo, Rust's package manager, runs build scripts during compilation. This allowed proc-macro1 to identify the operating system and processor architecture of the developer or build machine, download a matching payload, and execute it. Aikido found malware built for Linux, Windows, Intel Macs, and Apple Silicon Macs. The second-stage payload was more than a simple downloader. Aikido found code targeting Chromium-based browser data, including profiles for Google Chrome, Brave, and Microsoft Edge, as well as browser extension storage used by cryptocurrency wallets. It also found functionality to establish persistence and receive commands from the attacker's server. The Rust team also deleted proc-macro-en, aovine, arone, aronenao, and tinymember, warning that every version of those crates should be considered malicious. Developers have been urged to check their Cargo lockfiles and local registry caches for the affected packages. Rust credits Nextron Systems' research team with initially discovering and reporting the attack. It has not said how the legitimate maintainer was compromised, how many developers downloaded the poisoned releases, or how many systems ultimately executed the payload. The malicious packages may have lasted less than two hours on crates.io, but whoever was behind them chose a well-traveled route into developers' machines. ®