Sygnia Documents Lone Attacker Breaching AWS in 72 Hours With Agentic AI

An unnamed global enterprise's large AWS environment

A single financially motivated actor used AI-assisted, parallelized workflows to compromise a large AWS estate in about 72 hours, work that normally takes weeks, then attempted extortion. The attacker harvested secrets from S3, databases, Secrets Manager, and Parameter Store, established persistence via new access keys, IAM users, and reverse shells, exfiltrated RDS data, and staged reversible destructive moves (blocking S3 access, scaling containers to zero, writing deny ACLs, purging queues) for leverage; at one point four access keys from four accounts were used in a single second from one IP

LLM and agentic tooling lowered the barrier and accelerated recon, credential discovery, cloud enumeration, and pipeline abuse. Initial access came through an AWS key exposed by an internet-facing application. Investigated by Sygnia