Aqua Research Team

Team Nautilus focuses on cybersecurity research of the cloud native stack. Its mission is to uncover new vulnerabilities, threats and attacks that target containers, Kubernetes, serverless, and public cloud infrastructure — enabling new methods and tools to address them.

SECURITY RESEARCH

Shadow Roles: AWS Defaults Can Open the Door to Service Takeover

Security Threat

What if the biggest risk to your cloud environment wasn’t a misconfiguration you made, but one baked into the defaults? Our research uncovered security concerns in the deployment of resources within a few AWS services, specifically in the default AWS service roles. These roles, often created automatically or recommended during setup, grant overly broad permissions, …

SECURITY RESEARCH

Tomcat in the Crosshairs: New Research Reveals Ongoing Attacks

News headlines reported that it took just 30 hours for attackers to exploit a newly discovered vulnerability in Apache Tomcat servers. But what does this mean for workloads relying on Tomcat? Aqua Nautilus researchers discovered a new attack campaign targeting Apache Tomcat. In this blog, we shed light on newly discovered malware that targets Tomcat …

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SECURITY RESEARCH

Stopping Sobolan Malware with Aqua Runtime Protection

Aqua Nautilus researchers have discovered a new attack campaign targeting interactive computing environments such as Jupyter Notebooks. The attack consists of multiple stages, beginning with the download of a compressed file from a remote server. Once executed, the attacker deploys several malicious tools to exploit the server and establish persistence. This campaign poses a significant …

SECURITY RESEARCH

OPA Gatekeeper Bypass Reveals Risks in Kubernetes Policy Engines

Security Threat

Implementing Kubernetes securely can be a daunting task. Fortunately, there are tools in the K8s toolshed that provide out-of-the-box solutions using a single click. One such tools is OPA Gatekeeper. It is a great out-of-the-box security checkpoint to enforce security policies on Kubernetes. But are users using it correctly? Do they understand its limitations? Our …

SECURITY RESEARCH

300,000+ Prometheus Servers and Exporters Exposed to DoS Attacks

Security Threat

In this research, we uncovered several vulnerabilities and security flaws within the Prometheus ecosystem. These findings span across three major areas: information disclosure, denial-of-service (DoS), and code execution. We found that exposed Prometheus servers or exporters, often lacking proper authentication, allowed attackers to easily gather sensitive information, such as credentials and API keys.

SECURITY RESEARCH

Matrix Unleashes A New Widespread DDoS Campaign

Security Threat

Aqua Nautilus researchers uncovered a new and widespread Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) campaign orchestrated by a threat actor named Matrix. Triggered by activities detected on our honeypots, this investigation dives deep into Matrix’s methods, targets, tools, and overall goals.

SECURITY RESEARCH

Threat Actors Hijack Misconfigured Servers for Live Sports Streaming

Security Threat

To keep up with the ever-evolving world of cybersecurity, Aqua Nautilus researchers deploy honeypots that mimic real-world development environments. During a recent threat-hunting operation, they uncovered a surprising new attack vector: threat actors using misconfigured servers to hijack environments for streaming sports events. By exploiting misconfigured JupyterLab and Jupyter Notebook applications, attackers drop live streaming …

SECURITY RESEARCH

TeamTNT’s Docker Gatling Gun Campaign

Security Threat

Long time no see, Aqua Nautilus researchers have identified a new campaign in the making by TeamTNT, a notorious hacking group. In this campaign, TeamTNT appears to be returning to its roots while preparing for a large-scale attack on cloud native environments. The group is currently targeting exposed Docker daemons to deploy Sliver malware, a …

SECURITY RESEARCH

AWS CDK Risk: Exploiting a Missing S3 Bucket Allowed Account Takeover

Security Threat

In June 2024, we uncovered a security issue related to the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), an open-source project. This discovery adds to the six other vulnerabilities we discovered within AWS services. The impact of this issue could, in certain scenarios (outlined in the blog), allow an attacker to gain administrative access to a target AWS account, …

SECURITY RESEARCH

perfctl: A Stealthy Malware Targeting Millions of Linux Servers

Security Threat

In this blog post, Aqua Nautilus researchers aim to shed light on a Linux malware that, over the past 3-4 years, has actively sought more than 20,000 types of misconfigurations in order to target and exploit Linux servers. If you have a Linux server connected to the internet, you could be at risk. In fact, …

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Targeting containers, Kubernetes, serverless, and public cloud

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Unveil the World of Kinsing Malware

Our Aqua Nautilus team's relentless pursuit of understanding cybersecurity threats led to a deep dive deep into the world of Kinsing. Our latest report, meticulously curated by our research team, offers unparalleled insights into Kinsing operations, unveiling new discoveries and providing crucial strategies for security teams to mitigate associated risks effectively.

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Additional Resources

Research and Reports

Cloud Native Threat Report: Attacks in the Wild on the Container Supply Chain and Infrastructure

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Research and Reports

2023 Aqua Nautilus Research: A Comprehensive Cloud Native Threat Report

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Aqua Security is the pioneer in securing containerized cloud native applications from development to production. Aqua's full lifecycle solution prevents attacks by enforcing pre-deployment hygiene and mitigates attacks in real time in production, reducing mean time to repair and overall business risk. The Aqua Platform, a Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), integrates security from Code to Cloud, combining the power of agent and agentless technology into a single solution. With enterprise scale that doesn’t slow development pipelines, Aqua secures your future in the cloud. Founded in 2015, Aqua is headquartered in Boston, MA and Ramat Gan, IL protecting over 500 of the world’s largest enterprises.

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