Researchers warn of risks tied to abandoned cloud storage buckets

watchTowr researchers analyzed roughly 150 abandoned AWS S3 buckets and demonstrated that re-registering those bucket names allowed them to observe over 8 million requests and could enable attackers to serve malicious software updates, backdoored VM images, CloudFormation templates, or remote access tooling to requesting systems across governments, enterprises and security vendors; the report details impacted sectors, examples including .mil-related buckets, AWS and researcher actions to remediate, and recommends preventing re-registration of previously used bucket names and better lifecycle management of cloud resources.