Researchers Uncover ECScape Flaw in Amazon ECS Enabling Cross-Task Credential Theft
Aug 06, 2025
DevOps / Container Security
Cybersecurity researchers have demonstrated an "end-to-end privilege escalation chain" in Amazon Elastic Container Service ( ECS ) that could be exploited by an attacker to conduct lateral movement, access sensitive data, and seize control of the cloud environment. The attack technique has been codenamed ECScape by Sweet Security researcher Naor Haziz, who presented the findings today at the Black Hat USA security conference that's being held in Las Vegas. "We identified a way to abuse an undocumented ECS internal protocol to grab AWS credentials belonging to other ECS tasks on the same EC2 instance," Haziz said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "A malicious container with a low‑privileged IAM [Identity and Access Management] role can obtain the permissions of a higher‑privileged container running on the same host." Amazon ECS is a fully-managed container orchestration service that allows users to deploy, manage, and scale containerized a...
