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Comment by anonymouse008 | Hacker News Reader

[Edit] too funny, the first three comments are all similar messages with three different communication styles (this one the most terse, I have much to learn)...

> The AWS account takeover was possible because a highly privileged IAM role had been assigned to the EC2 instance running the vulnerable Docker container app. While the Log4j2 vulnerability allowed initial access to the Docker container, the privileged IAM role enabled lateral movement and ultimately a total compromise of the AWS account.

Saving you a click... who would realistically give such a high permission set IAM to an EC2?

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AWS is so difficult to use securely by default that there is an entire thriving industry of vendors who will analyze your permissions and try to bring them down to meet the standard of principal of least privilege. I'm not at all surprised that there are many insecure environments and privilege escalation exploits; AWS is almost aggressively hostile to any attempts to use it securely.

This is completely untrue. AWS offers many tools to audit credentials. It also has the policy simulator to see exactly what the impact of changes will be on a role.

> This is completely untrue. AWS offers many tools to audit credentials. It also has the policy simulator to see exactly what the impact of changes will be on a role.

Your comment fails to prove, or suggest, that OP's claim that AWS is too difficult to use securely by default is false. To first be in a position to refute OP's point you would need to prove, for starters, that no such vendor exists, which is absurd because they do exist, don't they?

In fact, if anything it supports OP's claim, as you've just pointed out that AWS even tries to profit from their problem of making it too difficult to use it securely by default by selling a premium service to audit credentials.

Minimizing AWS permissions to just the set you need can be a royal pain in the ass. Many of the canned AWS-managed example policies end up giving either ANY action on a resource, or grant a handful of actions on ANY resource, (e.g. grant S3:* on some bucket, which inadvertently lets you delete the bucket too)

Simply reading the docs and attempting to divine the right subset of permissions can be nearly impossible. Usually you must guess, then exercise the software until it fails, then look in CloudTrail to see which permissions got denied, then try a new covering set, and repeat until nothing breaks. To say this is frustrating would be an understatement.

Because many people setting up AWS don't know this.

Perhaps AWS should create a giant red alert that customers must acknowledge before applying such a configuration.

Where would the giant red alerts stop? They already have it for S3 after so many people left their buckets open. But is it also not our responsability to properly understand the tools we use?

They should stop where there is no risk. Consider commercial aircraft. They warn pilots of risks because despite having thousands of hours experience, humans (pilots) make mistakes.

> But is it also not our responsability to properly understand the tools we use?

For that, those who built the tools must communicate how the tools work. It's not our responsibility, nor is it even possible, to read the mind of the people who made the tools.

>Saving you a click... who would realistically give such a high permission set IAM to an EC2?

The same people who think docker/k8s is what everyone should use and that java is a slow language?

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