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Delivering Malware Through Abandoned Amazon S3 Buckets

Here’s a supply-chain attack just waiting to happen. A group of researchers searched for, and then registered, abandoned Amazon S3 buckets for about $400. These buckets contained software libraries that are still used. Presumably the projects don’t realize that they have been abandoned, and still ping them for patches, updates, and etc. The TL;DR is that this time, we ended up discovering ~150 Amazon S3 buckets that had previously been used across commercial and open source software products, governments, and infrastructure deployment/update pipelines—and then abandoned...

The TL;DR is that this time, we ended up discovering ~150 Amazon S3 buckets that had previously been used across commercial and open source software products, governments, and infrastructure deployment/update pipelines—and then abandoned. Naturally, we registered them, just to see what would happen—”how many people are really trying to request software updates from S3 buckets that appear to have been abandoned months or even years ago?”, we naively thought to ourselves. Had this been an actual attack, they would have modified the code in those buckets to contain malware and watch as it was incorporated in different software builds around the internet.

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