Exposed Training Open the Door for Crypto-Mining in Fortune 500 Cloud Environments
Feb 11, 2026
Identity Security / Threat Exposure
Intentionally vulnerable training applications are widely used for security education, internal testing, and product demonstrations. Tools such as OWASP Juice Shop, DVWA, Hackazon, and bWAPP are designed to be insecure by default, making them useful for learning how common attack techniques work in controlled environments. The issue is not the applications themselves, but how they are often deployed and maintained in real-world cloud environments. Pentera Labs examined how training and demo applications are being used across cloud infrastructures and identified a recurring pattern: applications intended for isolated lab use were frequently found exposed to the public internet, running inside active cloud accounts, and connected to cloud identities with broader access than required. Deployment Patterns Observed in the Research Pentera Labs research found that these applications were often deployed with default configurations, minimal isolation, and overly permissive cloud roles. T...