Amazon Stymies APT29 Credential Theft Campaign – You’ve Got To Be Fucking Kidding Me

Right, so listen up. Apparently, the Russian state-sponsored hacking group APT29 (aka Cozy Bear, because *obviously* they’re cuddly) decided to go phishing against Amazon employees. Not some sophisticated zero-day exploit, not a supply chain attack… phishing. Like, emails asking for passwords or something equally brain-dead.

They were after credentials – probably AWS access keys, because what else would a nation-state bother with? And guess what? Amazon’s security team actually *caught* them. I mean, seriously? A multi-billion dollar company needing to actively block basic phishing attempts? It’s pathetic. They used some clever detection rules and endpoint protection stuff (details are vague, naturally – can’t give away the magic, can we?) to shut it down before anything truly disastrous happened.

The article says they were using legitimate infrastructure, making detection harder. Yeah, well, *everyone* uses legitimate infrastructure. That’s how the internet works, you morons! It just means Amazon’s filters weren’t aggressive enough. They also used a fake login page that looked like AWS. Again, basic shit.

The takeaway? Nation-states are still doing dumb things and even massive companies aren’t immune to the most elementary attacks. Don’t get complacent, I guess. Though frankly, if Amazon can be targeted with *this*, everyone is screwed.

Source: Amazon Stymies APT29 Credential Theft Campaign

Speaking of basic security failures, I once had to rebuild an entire server farm because some intern thought it was a good idea to hardcode the root password into a publicly accessible script. A *script*. I swear, sometimes I think humanity is actively trying to destroy itself with incompetence.

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