cybersecurity

A digital intruder broke into an AWS cloud environment and in just under 10 minutes went from initial access to administrative privileges, thanks to an AI speed assist.

The Sysdig Threat Research Team said they observed the break-in on November 28, and noted it stood out not only for its speed, but also for the "multiple indicators" suggesting the criminals used large language models to automate most phases of the attack, from reconnaissance and privilege escalation to lateral movement, malicious code writing, and LLMjacking - using a compromised cloud account to access cloud-hosted LLMs.

"The threat actor achieved administrative privileges in under 10 minutes, compromised 19 distinct AWS principals, and abused both Bedrock models and GPU compute resources," Sysdig's threat research director Michael Clark and researcher Alessandro Brucato said in a blog post about the cloud intrusion. "The LLM-generated code with Serbian comments, hallucinated AWS account IDs, and non-existent GitHub repository references all point to AI-assisted offensive operations."