The Sub-10-Minute Cloud Takeover: How Exposed IAM Keys, Misconfiguration and AI Are Rewriting the Rules of Cloud Breaches

This report analyzes two rapid cloud intrusions—a 10-minute crypto-mining campaign exploiting compromised IAM credentials to provision compute, and an 8-minute AI-focused intrusion that leveraged a public S3-exposed key to traverse 19 AWS principals, manipulate Lambda, enumerate secrets, and abuse Amazon Bedrock—illustrating how interconnected cloud permissions and AI/automation shorten attacker decision and execution cycles and recommending identity governance, least privilege, credential hygiene, and runtime detection to mitigate such threats.