Solo attacker uses AI to breach AWS environment in 72 hours

Sygnia published research on a financially motivated lone actor who compromised a global enterprise AWS environment.

The attacker used AI-assisted workflows to accelerate reconnaissance, tool development and environment-specific adaptation.

Initial access came from an exposed application vulnerability that leaked an AWS access key.

The attacker chained weaknesses across application services, AWS resources, source code repos, CI/CD pipelines, runtime components and data stores to extort the victim within roughly 72 hours.