Preventing One of The Largest Supply Chain Attacks in History
Maksim Shudrak
DEF CON 33 (backfill) · Day 1 · Main Stage
Maksim Shudrak's DEF CON talk, "Preventing One of The Largest Supply Chain Attacks in History," unveils a critical and widespread supply chain vulnerability rooted in the recycling of cloud storage bucket names, specifically AWS S3. The presentation demonstrates how attackers can reclaim abandoned S3 buckets, inject malicious payloads, and subsequently compromise an enormous number of users, organizations, and even government networks globally. The core of the problem lies in software, scripts, or even malware that continue to reference S3 buckets long after their legitimate owners have deleted them, leaving a persistent, exploitable link.
AI review
Shudrak takes a known-ish concept — dangling cloud bucket references — and actually does the work: crawls GitHub, Maven, PyPI, and malware corpora at scale, claims the buckets responsibly, runs five days of live traffic logging, and produces real numbers. 28,000 affected hosts, 25 government networks, $20 total attack cost. That's not a thought experiment, that's a campaign.