Cases3 cases

1 to 3 of 3

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.

   View case
2. IL-0068 Anonymous access to the Kubernetes API server used to plant a ClusterRoleBinding backdoor and a cryptominer DaemonSet

   Aqua Security2023

   Symptoms

   Aqua's research team Nautilus recorded the attack on one of its Kubernetes honeypots. What appeared in the cluster was a DaemonSet running the image kuberntesio/kube-controller:1.0.1 from Docker Hub on every node, using the nodes' CPU to mine Monero.

   Unauthorised access or a foreign workloadResources deleted

   Trigger

   An API server misconfigured to accept unauthenticated requests from anonymous users with privileges.

   Root cause

   Configuration change

   Component

   Kubernetes API serverRBAC and service accountsContainer registry and its credentials

   Contributing factor

   Monitoring blind spot

   Detection

   Aqua recorded the attacker's API requests on its honeypot; planted AWS access keys raised a beacon when the attacker tried to use them.

   Lessons

   Fixing an exposed API server is not enough once an attacker has been in: a ClusterRoleBinding to an attacker-created ServiceAccount keeps working after anonymous access is closed. Attackers name these objects and images after real Kubernetes components so they blend into the API audit logs and pass for legitimate deployments. Aqua recommends scanning clusters for vulnerabilities, exposed secrets and misconfigurations with a tool such as Trivy.

   View case
3. IL-0113 The managed GKE control plane of Webhook Relay's main cluster failed because its API server certificates had never been rotated, and a manual credential rotation reported success without taking effect

   Webhook Relay2022

   Symptoms

   At 12:00 EST the health check system reported that the backend APIs, the frontend and the tunnels in the EU region were down. The team first took it for a transient error, such as an interrupted client request or a server evicted for memory or CPU pressure, but the main dashboard was offline as well.

   Service outageControl plane lagControl plane unresponsiveStale or inconsistent API readsCredentials unavailable

   Root cause

   Certificate or credential expiry

   Component

   GKE control planeKubernetes API serverNode poolRBAC and service accounts

   Contributing factor

   Limited debug accessSingle point of failure

   Detection

   The health check system sent a notification that the service was down; the team then found the main dashboard offline.

   Remediation

   • recreated the node pools by hand after the credential rotation failed to recreate them
   • duplicated the main cluster's services into a newly created GKE cluster
   • deleted the Kubernetes Service records in the old cluster so its load balancers could be attached to the new cluster
   • detached the StatefulSet from the old cluster and switched all writes to the main disk
   • exported the data from the temporary ClickHouse instance and inserted it into the main instance

   Action items

   • Change the deployment manifests so services can be switched between clusters quickly without a complicated persistent disk migration

   Lessons

   Recovery of existing infrastructure needs a time limit. Throughout the outage the old cluster looked about to recover, and the reluctance to give up on the salvage effort kept the team from starting over with a new cluster much sooner, which would have been the right call. On older GKE clusters, check the validity of the cluster CA certificate, for example by decoding masterAuth.clusterCaCertificate from gcloud container clusters describe and reading it with openssl x509. GKE's multiple availability zones made no difference in this failure.

   View case

By root cause3