Ensure the IAM roles attached to your EC2 instances have the minimum permissions necessary. Even if credentials are stolen, they will be limited in what they can access. 4. Monitor with Amazon GuardDuty
The IP address 169.254.169.254 is a link-local address used by AWS (and similarly by Google Cloud and Azure with different paths) to provide configuration data to an EC2 instance.
The URL http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/iam/security-credentials/ is part of the AWS Instance Metadata Service. This service provides information about the EC2 instance that it's running on, including metadata and temporary security credentials. Ensure the IAM roles attached to your EC2
The string represents a URL-encoded payload frequently captured by web application firewalls (WAFs), log analyzers, and intrusion detection systems. When decoded, it reveals an attempt to manipulate an application into sending a callback request to http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/iam/security-credentials/ .
The local metadata service responds to the web server with the temporary IAM credentials. The web server then inadvertently displays or leaks these credentials back to the attacker in the HTTP response. Monitor with Amazon GuardDuty The IP address 169
The attacker uses scanners to locate web applications hosted on EC2 that are vulnerable to SSRF. They test various SSRF payloads by injecting the metadata endpoint into user-controllable parameters (e.g., url= , dest= , redirect= ). A probe might look like: https://victim.com/proxy?url=http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/
Due to the prevalence of SSRF attacks, AWS introduced the . and intrusion detection systems. When decoded
To fetch the credentials, a user or application typically follows these steps: 1. List Available Roles