Recent AWS Campaign Targets Customers with Crypto Mining Malware

Amazon recently alerted AWS customers about a sophisticated campaign aimed at exploiting compromised Identity and Access Management (IAM) credentials to facilitate unauthorized cryptocurrency mining. This activity was first identified by Amazon’s GuardDuty service on November 2, 2025.

Key Details

Who: Amazon Web Services
What: Discovery of a multi-stage crypto mining attack using compromised IAM credentials
When: Activity detected on November 2, 2025
Where: Amazon EC2 and ECS environments
Why: To exploit computing resources for cryptocurrency mining
How: Attackers leverage IAM permissions to deploy and scale mining activities quickly, using intentional techniques that evade detection.

The attack chain starts with threat actors using stolen IAM admin-like credentials to probe AWS environments. By utilizing the "DryRun" API, they validate permissions without incurring costs, before creating autoscaling groups and deploying malicious Docker images designed for mining.

Notably, the attackers employed the ModifyInstanceAttribute action to enable "disableApiTermination," which complicates incident response by preventing the forced termination of compromised instances.

Why It Matters

This campaign showcases emerging tactics that pose significant threats to enterprise cloud environments, particularly in:

• Hybrid/Multi-Cloud Adoption: As businesses leverage diverse cloud architectures, the risk of identity compromise increases dramatically.
• Enterprise Security and Compliance: Traditional security measures may falter against advanced and evolving methods of attack.
• Resource Optimization: Unchecked crypto mining can result in excessive operational costs.

Takeaway for IT Teams

IT professionals must ramp up identity management practices to prevent unauthorized access. Implementing measures such as multi-factor authentication, the principle of least privilege, and monitoring unusual resource allocation is critical.

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