Ethical Hacking News
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) has been left vulnerable to attack after researchers discovered a critical vulnerability that allows attackers to exploit the service and gain access to sensitive data and control over cloud environments. The vulnerability, codenamed ECScape, was uncovered by researchers at Sweet Security and has sent shockwaves through the cybersecurity community. In this article, we will delve into the details of the discovery and explore the implications for organizations that rely on AWS and use ECS to deploy containerized applications.
Researchers at Sweet Security discovered a vulnerability, codenamed ECScape, in Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) allowing attackers to gain access to sensitive data and cloud environments. The vulnerability allows an attacker to exploit an undocumented internal protocol in ECS to obtain AWS credentials of other tasks running on the same EC2 instance. Attacks can conduct lateral movement, access sensitive data, and seize control of the cloud environment by exploiting the ECScape vulnerability. Amazon has advised customers to adopt stronger isolation models, avoid deploying high-privilege tasks with untrusted or low-privilege tasks, and use AWS Fargate for true isolation. The discovery highlights the need for organizations to adopt a proactive approach to security and stay vigilant in the face of emerging threats.
Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) has been left reeling after a devastating vulnerability was discovered that allows attackers to exploit the service and gain access to sensitive data and control over cloud environments. The vulnerability, codenamed ECScape, was uncovered by researchers at Sweet Security, who presented their findings at the recent Black Hat USA security conference.
The discovery of ECScape has sent shockwaves through the cybersecurity community, with many experts warning that the vulnerability could have severe consequences for organizations that rely on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and use ECS to deploy containerized applications. According to researchers Naor Haziz and his team, the vulnerability allows an attacker to exploit an undocumented internal protocol in ECS to obtain the AWS credentials of other ECS tasks running on the same EC2 instance.
This means that a malicious container with a low-privileged IAM role can gain access to the permissions of a higher-privileged container running on the same host. The researchers demonstrated an "end-to-end privilege escalation chain" that shows how an attacker could exploit this vulnerability to conduct lateral movement, access sensitive data, and seize control of the cloud environment.
The attack technique works by first obtaining the host's IAM role credentials, which allows the attacker to impersonate the agent and obtain credentials for any task on the same instance. The attackers then discover the ECS control plane endpoint that the agent talks to and gather the necessary identifiers to authenticate as the agent using the Task Metadata endpoint and ECS introspection API.
The researchers also demonstrated how an attacker could forge a WebSocket request impersonating the agent, which allows them to harvest credentials for all running tasks on the same instance. The entire sequence of events is a stark reminder that even the most seemingly secure cloud services can have vulnerabilities that leave them wide open to attack.
In response to this discovery, Amazon has emphasized the need for customers to adopt stronger isolation models where applicable and make it clear in its documentation that there is no task isolation in EC2. The company also advises customers to avoid deploying high-privilege tasks alongside untrusted or low-privilege tasks on the same instance, use AWS Fargate for true isolation, disable or restrict the instance metadata service (IMDS) access for tasks, limit ECS agent permissions, and set up CloudTrail alerts to detect unusual usage of IAM roles.
The discovery of ECScape serves as a stark reminder that cybersecurity is no longer just about protecting individual applications but rather about protecting entire cloud environments. It also highlights the need for organizations to adopt a proactive approach to security and stay vigilant in the face of emerging threats.
In addition to the discovery of ECScape, there have been several other cloud-related security weaknesses reported in recent weeks, including vulnerabilities in Google Cloud Build's GitHub integration, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Code Editor, Microsoft first-party application's Service principal (SP), Azure Machine Learning service, and legacy AmazonGuardDutyFullAccess AWS managed policy. These vulnerabilities demonstrate that cloud services are not immune to security threats and that the cybersecurity landscape is constantly evolving.
The researchers at Sweet Security have called for organizations to treat each container as potentially compromiseable and rigorously constrain its blast radius. They also emphasize the need for customers to stay up-to-date with the latest security patches and ensure that all cloud services and dependencies are secure.
In conclusion, the discovery of ECScape has left the cybersecurity community reeling, but it serves as a stark reminder that organizations must be vigilant in the face of emerging threats. The vulnerabilities reported in recent weeks demonstrate that cloud services are not immune to security threats and that the cybersecurity landscape is constantly evolving.
Related Information:
https://www.ethicalhackingnews.com/articles/A-Devastating-Discovery-Amazon-ECS-Vulnerability-Exposed-Leaving-Cloud-Environments-Wide-Open-to-Attackers-ehn.shtml
https://thehackernews.com/2025/08/researchers-uncover-ecscape-flaw-in.html
Published: Thu Aug 7 12:27:41 2025 by llama3.2 3B Q4_K_M
