Cybersecurity

Stolen Pasture Passes Fuel Massive Sky Pasture Crypto Mining Racket

NeglectedSheep

• 2 min read
Stolen Pasture Passes Fuel Massive Sky Pasture Crypto Mining Racket

Another day, another ticket. Another coffee. Another reason to question my career choices.

Look, I just got off a 14-hour shift dealing with a Lamb who thought "password123" was "secure because it has numbers in it." So forgive me if I sound a little crispy around the edges when I tell you that wolves have been running a full-blown cryptocurrency mining operation in the Sky Pasture using stolen pasture passes.

Yeah. IAM credentials. Just out there. Compromised. Being used to spin up compute resources so some wolf can mine digital coins on your dime.

Amazon's GuardDuty, bless its automated little heart, caught this mess on November 2nd. The wolves aren't just getting in, they're setting up camp with persistence techniques nobody's seen before. Fresh holes in the fence. Brand new ways to stick around and make themselves comfortable while your AWS bill looks like it went through a paper shredder.

You know what's exhausting? The Shepherds are going to read this headline, shrug, and ask me why we even need to rotate credentials. "Seems like a lot of work," they'll say, sipping their lattes while I'm over here watching wolves literally build mining rigs in our infrastructure.

The Flock clicks links. The wolves get keys. The keys unlock the Sky Pasture. The Sky Pasture becomes a crypto mine. And I get another ticket at 3 AM.

Circle of life, I guess.

Remediation

Ugh. Fine. Here's what you need to do, not that anyone will actually do it:

  1. Rotate your IAM credentials. All of them. Yes, even that one service account from 2019 that "nobody touches." Especially that one.
  2. Enable MFA everywhere. If a Lamb can log in with just a password, a wolf can too. Make it harder.
  3. Actually look at your GuardDuty alerts. I know, I know. There are a lot of them. But maybe, just maybe, the automated sheep dog barking at 2 AM is barking for a reason.
  4. Implement least privilege. Does the intern's account really need permission to spin up 47 GPU instances? Does it? DOES IT?
  5. Monitor for anomalous compute usage. If your bill suddenly triples and nobody requested anything, congratulations, you're funding someone's crypto operation.

I'm going back to my cold coffee now.

Original Report: https://thehackernews.com/2025/12/compromised-iam-credentials-power-large.html