CLOUD-CLOUDSQL-PRIVESC-2023

Leaky Vessels was a set of container-escape vulnerabilities disclosed on 31 January 2024 by Rory McNamara of Snyk Security Labs, the headline flaw being CVE-2024-21626 (CVSS 8.6, runc 1.1.11 and earlier). It was an order-of-operations file-descriptor leak in runc's handling of the process working directory (WORKDIR / process.cwd). During container setup runc left an internal file descriptor referencing the host filesystem namespace open before all privileged descriptors were closed, so a malicious image or a build using a malicious Dockerfile or upstream FROM could set the working directory to that leaked descriptor via a path like /proc/self/fd/7. Because chdir occurred before the descriptor was closed, the container process gained a working directory in the host filesystem and could read and write host files, breaking container isolation and escaping to the underlying host. Related Docker BuildKit issues were disclosed alongside it: CVE-2024-23651 (mount cache race), CVE-2024-23652 (build-time arbitrary delete), and CVE-2024-23653 (GRPC SecurityMode privilege check bypass). The flaw was fixed in runc 1.1.12.

On 9 September 2021 Palo Alto Unit 42 researcher Yuval Avrahami disclosed Azurescape, described as the first cross-account container takeover in a public cloud, in which a malicious container on Azure Container Instances could escape and gain control over other customers' containers running on the shared multitenant Kubernetes cluster. ACI ran an outdated container runtime, runC v1.0.0-rc2, which was vulnerable to CVE-2019-5736, letting the attacker break out of the container and execute code as root on the underlying Kubernetes node. From the node the researcher found the bridge pod, which serviced az container exec calls, sent a Kubernetes service-account token in the Authorization header to a Kubelet that also allowed anonymous access; decoding that token (related to CVE-2018-1002102) granted pods/exec rights across all namespaces and control of the api-server, and thus the whole multitenant cluster. This was a provider-side flaw under shared responsibility that customers could not patch; Unit 42 found it and reported it with no knowledge of exploitation in the wild.

A remote code execution flaw in the Windows Print Spooler service allows an authenticated domain user to load a malicious printer driver DLL and execute code as SYSTEM, both locally and remotely. A working proof-of-concept was accidentally published before a patch existed, so Microsoft assigned a new identifier and shipped out-of-band fixes. Because nearly every Windows host, including domain controllers, runs the spooler, it gave attackers a near-universal lateral-movement and privilege-escalation primitive. It was exploited in ransomware intrusions by Vice Society, Conti, and Magniber.

A misconfigured ModSecurity web application firewall on an AWS EC2 instance was abused via server-side request forgery to reach the EC2 Instance Metadata Service at 169.254.169.254 and retrieve the temporary IAM credentials of the WAF's role. Because that role was over-privileged, the attacker used the stolen credentials to exfiltrate data from Capital One's S3 buckets. Roughly 100 million US individuals and 6 million Canadians were exposed, including about 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 linked bank account numbers. Attacker Paige Thompson, a former AWS engineer, was arrested July 29, 2019 and later convicted. The incident directly motivated AWS's release of IMDSv2.

IngressNightmare was a chain of five vulnerabilities in the Ingress-NGINX Controller for Kubernetes disclosed on 24 March 2025 by the Wiz Research team, the most severe being CVE-2025-1974 (CVSS 9.8), which enabled unauthenticated remote code execution from the pod network. Wiz estimated about 43% of cloud environments were vulnerable and identified over 6,500 publicly exposed clusters, including Fortune 500 organizations. The controller's validating admission webhook ran as an unauthenticated HTTP endpoint reachable by any workload on the pod network, accepting attacker-supplied AdmissionReview requests containing crafted Ingress objects. The supporting CVEs (CVE-2025-24514 auth-url, CVE-2025-1097 auth-tls-match-cn, CVE-2025-1098 mirror UID, CVE-2025-24513 path bypass) injected unsanitized NGINX configuration directives via annotations into a temporary config the controller validated with nginx -t. The attacker uploaded a shared-library payload by abusing NGINX client-body buffering (an oversized Content-Length keeps the request file descriptor open in ProcFS) and then used the injected ssl_engine directive to load that library during validation, achieving code execution in the controller pod whose service account could read all cluster secrets across namespaces, enabling full cluster takeover.

On August 15, 2024, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 detailed a large-scale extortion campaign that compromised cloud environments by harvesting exposed environment variable files. Attackers scanned at least 110,000 domains and collected over 90,000 unique variables, including roughly 7,000 cloud service credentials and 1,515 social media credentials, with their infrastructure probing around 230 million targets. The vector was a web server misconfiguration: .env files inside the web root were served as plaintext over HTTP because the servers had no rule denying access to dotfiles, exposing the long-lived AWS IAM access keys hardcoded inside. The initial IAM principals lacked full admin but retained permission to create roles and users, so attackers called CreateRole and attached AdministratorAccess to escalate, then spun up Lambda functions across regions to automate further internet-wide scanning. They used the victims' own AWS accounts to exfiltrate and delete S3 objects, then uploaded ransom notes demanding payment. The failure chain combined exposed dotfiles, long-lived hardcoded credentials, and over-permissioned IAM, not any cloud-provider flaw.