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1. IL-0069 Attackers stole a high-privilege service account token from a production Kubernetes cluster and used it to reach a cryptocurrency exchange's financial systems

   Unnamed cryptocurrency exchange2026

   Symptoms

   Inside the cluster the attacker left these traces: a new pod appeared in the production Kubernetes cluster that was built to expose its mounted service account token; requests authenticated as a broad management service account listed secrets and touched workloads in many namespaces; and a backdoor was placed in a running production pod.

   Unauthorised access or a foreign workload

   Trigger

   A spearphishing attack gave the attacker a foothold on a developer's workstation. The attacker used the developer's active, privileged cloud session to deploy a malicious pod to the production cluster.

   Root cause

   Credential exposure

   Component

   RBAC and service accountsKubernetes API server

   Contributing factor

   Excessive blast radius

   Lessons

   Unit 42 concludes that a single over-privileged identity turned one malicious pod into cluster-wide and then cloud-wide access. Its recommendations are least-privilege RBAC with the Restricted Pod Security Standard, short-lived projected service account tokens bound to the pod's lifetime, runtime monitoring of what containers actually do, and Kubernetes audit logging so that identity-driven changes can be seen and reconstructed.

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