• Home
  • Cyber Crime
  • Cyber warfare
  • APT
  • Data Breach
  • Deep Web
  • Digital ID
  • Hacking
  • Hacktivism
  • Intelligence
  • Internet of Things
  • Laws and regulations
  • Malware
  • Mobile
  • Reports
  • Security
  • Social Networks
  • Terrorism
  • ICS-SCADA
  • POLICIES
  • Contact me
MUST READ

U.S. CISA urges FCEB agencies to fix two Microsoft SharePoint flaws immediately and added them to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

 | 

Sophos fixed two critical Sophos Firewall vulnerabilities

 | 

French Authorities confirm XSS.is admin arrested in Ukraine

 | 

Microsoft linked attacks on SharePoint flaws to China-nexus actors

 | 

Cisco confirms active exploitation of ISE and ISE-PIC flaws

 | 

SharePoint under fire: new ToolShell attacks target enterprises

 | 

CrushFTP zero-day actively exploited at least since July 18

 | 

Hardcoded credentials found in HPE Aruba Instant On Wi-Fi devices

 | 

MuddyWater deploys new DCHSpy variants amid Iran-Israel conflict

 | 

U.S. CISA urges to immediately patch Microsoft SharePoint flaw adding it to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

 | 

Microsoft issues emergency patches for SharePoint zero-days exploited in "ToolShell" attacks

 | 

SharePoint zero-day CVE-2025-53770 actively exploited in the wild

 | 

Singapore warns China-linked group UNC3886 targets its critical infrastructure

 | 

U.S. CISA adds Fortinet FortiWeb flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

 | 

SECURITY AFFAIRS MALWARE NEWSLETTER ROUND 54

 | 

Security Affairs newsletter Round 533 by Pierluigi Paganini – INTERNATIONAL EDITION

 | 

Radiology Associates of Richmond data breach impacts 1.4 million people

 | 

Fortinet FortiWeb flaw CVE-2025-25257 exploited hours after PoC release

 | 

Authorities released free decryptor for Phobos and 8base ransomware

 | 

Anne Arundel Dermatology data breach impacts 1.9 million people

 | 
  • Home
  • Cyber Crime
  • Cyber warfare
  • APT
  • Data Breach
  • Deep Web
  • Digital ID
  • Hacking
  • Hacktivism
  • Intelligence
  • Internet of Things
  • Laws and regulations
  • Malware
  • Mobile
  • Reports
  • Security
  • Social Networks
  • Terrorism
  • ICS-SCADA
  • POLICIES
  • Contact me
  • Home
  • Breaking News
  • Hacking
  • whoAMI attack could allow remote code execution within AWS account

whoAMI attack could allow remote code execution within AWS account

Pierluigi Paganini February 17, 2025

Researchers warn that the whoAMI attack lets attackers publish an AMI with a specific name to execute code in an AWS account.

Cybersecurity researchers at Datadog Security Labs devised a new name confusion attack technique, called whoAMI, that allows threat actors to execute arbitrary code execution within the Amazon Web Services (AWS) account by publishing an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) with a specific name.

The researchers warn that, at scale, this attack could impact thousands of AWS accounts, with around 1% of organizations estimated to be vulnerable.

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a virtual machine image used to launch Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. Users can specify an AMI by ID or search for the latest version via AWS’s API.

Datadog Security Labs pointed out that anyone can publish an AMI to the Community AMI catalog, for this to determine if searching the catalog for an AMI ID, users will get an official AMI and not one published by a malicious actor he can specify the owners attribute.

Specifyng the owners attribute when searching for AMIs could ensure results come from verified sources like Amazon or trusted providers.

If the owners attribute is omitted in an AMI search, an attacker can publish a malicious AMI with a recent date, making it the top result in automated queries.

The attack occurs when a victim uses the name filter, fails to specify the owner, owner-alias, or owner-id parameters, and retrieves the most recently created image.

“To exploit this configuration, an attacker can create a malicious AMI with a name that matches the above pattern and that is newer than any other AMIs that also match the pattern. The attacker can then either make the AMI public or privately share it with the targeted AWS account.” reads the advisory published by the company. This is what the attack looks like if executed by a malicious actor:

“For example, to exploit the wildcard expansion pattern above, an attacker can publish a malicious AMI with the name ubuntu/images/hvm-ssd/ubuntu-focal-20.04-amd64-server-whoAMI, and make it public. It’s that simple!””

The researchers published a video PoC of the attack, they created an AMI with a C2 backdoor preinstalled (Attacker AWS Account ID: 864899841852, Victim AWS Account ID: 438465165216).

“This research demonstrated the existence and potential impact of a name confusion attack targeting AWS’s community AMI catalog. Though the vulnerable components fall on the customer side of the shared responsibility model, there are now controls in place to help you prevent and/or detect this vulnerability in your environments and code.” concludes the report. “Since we initially shared our findings with AWS, they have released Allowed AMIs, an excellent new guardrail that can be used by all AWS customers to prevent the whoAMI attack from succeeding, and we strongly encourage adoption of this control. This is really great work by the EC2 team!”

As of last November, HashiCorp addressed the issue in terraform-aws-provider 5.77, issuing a warning when “most_recent=true” is used without an owner filter. This will become an error in version 6.0.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, whoAMI)


facebook linkedin twitter

hacking news information security news IT Information Security Pierluigi Paganini Security Affairs Security News whoAMI

you might also like

Pierluigi Paganini July 23, 2025
U.S. CISA urges FCEB agencies to fix two Microsoft SharePoint flaws immediately and added them to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog
Read more
Pierluigi Paganini July 23, 2025
Sophos fixed two critical Sophos Firewall vulnerabilities
Read more

leave a comment

newsletter

Subscribe to my email list and stay
up-to-date!

    recent articles

    U.S. CISA urges FCEB agencies to fix two Microsoft SharePoint flaws immediately and added them to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

    Hacking / July 23, 2025

    Sophos fixed two critical Sophos Firewall vulnerabilities

    Security / July 23, 2025

    French Authorities confirm XSS.is admin arrested in Ukraine

    Cyber Crime / July 23, 2025

    Microsoft linked attacks on SharePoint flaws to China-nexus actors

    APT / July 23, 2025

    Cisco confirms active exploitation of ISE and ISE-PIC flaws

    Hacking / July 22, 2025

    To contact me write an email to:

    Pierluigi Paganini :
    pierluigi.paganini@securityaffairs.co

    LEARN MORE

    QUICK LINKS

    • Home
    • Cyber Crime
    • Cyber warfare
    • APT
    • Data Breach
    • Deep Web
    • Digital ID
    • Hacking
    • Hacktivism
    • Intelligence
    • Internet of Things
    • Laws and regulations
    • Malware
    • Mobile
    • Reports
    • Security
    • Social Networks
    • Terrorism
    • ICS-SCADA
    • POLICIES
    • Contact me

    Copyright@securityaffairs 2024

    We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept All”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies. However, you may visit "Cookie Settings" to provide a controlled consent.
    Cookie SettingsAccept All
    Manage consent

    Privacy Overview

    This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities...
    Necessary
    Always Enabled
    Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
    Non-necessary
    Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
    SAVE & ACCEPT