CONTAINER-EXPOSED-DOCKER-API

In research disclosed to AWS on February 16, 2024 and presented at Black Hat USA and DEF CON 32 in August 2024, Aqua Security's Nautilus team described a class of S3 bucket-name takeover attacks they called Bucket Monopoly, affecting CloudFormation, Glue, EMR, SageMaker, Service Catalog, and CodeStar. These services auto-created S3 buckets with predictable names built from static prefixes plus the account ID and region, such as cf-templates-{hash}-{region}, aws-glue-assets-{account-id}-{region}, and sagemaker-{region}-{account-id}, where account IDs are discoverable from ARNs, access keys, and public repos. Because S3 bucket names are globally unique, an attacker could pre-create a victim's predictably named bucket in a region the victim had not yet used (a Shadow Resource), then the victim's service would later read attacker-controlled content from it. This enabled data tampering, information disclosure, remote code execution by injecting malicious Glue or CloudFormation content, and in some cases full account takeover via planted admin roles; AWS remediated by adding randomized suffixes to bucket names and enforcing aws:ResourceAccount conditions. The class also covers reuse of abandoned or dangling bucket names that a victim configuration still references.

On 14 September 2021 Wiz disclosed OMIGOD, a set of four flaws in Open Management Infrastructure (OMI), an agent that Azure silently auto-deploys onto many Linux VMs via services such as Log Analytics, Azure Automation, Azure Diagnostics and Defender for Cloud. The flagship bug, CVE-2021-38647 (CVSS 9.8), gave unauthenticated remote code execution as root, while CVE-2021-38645, CVE-2021-38648 and CVE-2021-38649 were local privilege escalations. The agent ran as root and could expose a management port (5985, 5986 or 1270); because the authorization code left the AuthInfo struct at its zero-initialized default of uid 0 and gid 0, a request that omitted the Authorization header was treated as an authenticated root request, so a single crafted packet yielded root code execution. This was a provider-side flaw under shared responsibility that most customers did not know was installed and could not patch themselves. Unlike the other entries here it was exploited in the wild within days, with attackers scanning for exposed agents and dropping Mirai botnet and cryptominer payloads.

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.

On 25 August 2021 Wiz researchers Nir Ohfeld and Sagi Tzadik disclosed ChaosDB, a cross-tenant flaw in Azure Cosmos DB that let any customer retrieve the primary access keys, certificates and connection details of several thousand other customers' database accounts, enabling full cross-tenant read, write and delete. The chain abused the Cosmos DB built-in Jupyter Notebook feature, which had been enabled by default since February 2021. A notebook ran attacker C# code as root while Python ran unprivileged, giving container root, after which the attacker removed iptables rules to reach the WireServer (168.63.129.16) and Instance Metadata endpoints. Querying WireServer yielded roughly two dozen Microsoft certificates, including private keys for internal Cosmos DB and notebook services, which were used to authenticate to internal Service Fabric clusters, enumerate every customer's Cosmos DB instance and decrypt their stored COSMOSDB_ACCOUNT_KEY and notebook auth tokens. This was a provider-side flaw under shared responsibility that customers could not patch; it was found and reported by researchers with no evidence of exploitation in the wild.

On August 23, 2021, UpGuard disclosed that misconfigured Microsoft Power Apps portals exposed roughly 38 million records across 47 organizations, including American Airlines, Ford, J.B. Hunt, the Maryland Department of Health, the State of Indiana, New York City agencies, and Microsoft itself. Exposed data included names, email addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, and COVID-19 contact tracing and vaccination appointment information. Power Apps portals surface list data through OData list feeds reachable at predictable URLs, and access to those feeds is gated by Table Permissions, but Table Permissions were disabled by default on every list. Because security was opt-in, any portal where a developer enabled an OData feed without explicitly configuring and enabling Table Permissions returned its records to any unauthenticated visitor querying the OData endpoint. This is an insecure-default access-control misconfiguration where the platform defaulted to anonymous read rather than deny.

On February 3, 2021, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 reported Hildegard, the first known TeamTNT campaign targeting Kubernetes, detected in January 2021. The attackers gained initial access through a misconfigured kubelet: the kubelet read-write API on port 10250 was reachable and accepted anonymous, unauthenticated requests because it was configured with --anonymous-auth set to true and --authorization-mode set to AlwaysAllow, the insecure legacy defaults shipped by some self-managed clusters. Anyone who could reach port 10250 could call the kubelet run-command API to execute commands inside running pods with no credentials. The attackers used this to exec into pods, move laterally across containers, scan for more exposed kubelets, and harvest cloud access keys, SSH keys, Docker credentials, and service-account tokens from the environment. They then deployed the XMRig Monero miner for cryptojacking, using a tmate reverse shell and IRC for command and control and LD_PRELOAD injection to hide processes. The misconfiguration class is missing authentication caused by an insecure default on an internet-reachable management port.