Crimson Collective Targets AWS Environments for Data Theft
Cyber Security News by CyberSum.net
The Crimson Collective threat group has been targeting AWS cloud environments to steal data and extort companies. They compromised long-term AWS access keys and IAM accounts for privilege escalation, using tools like TruffleHog to discover exposed credentials. After gaining access, they created new IAM users and login profiles, attached 'AdministratorAccess' policies, and enumerated users, instances, and databases. The group then modified RDS master passwords, created snapshots, and exported them to S3 for exfiltration. They sent extortion notes via AWS SES and external email accounts. Rapid7 recommends using short-term, least-privileged credentials and implementing restrictive IAM policies to mitigate these attacks.