More on Abusing the Amazon Web Services SSM Agent as a Remote Access Trojan

This report demonstrates that the AWS Systems Manager (SSM) agent—widely preinstalled on many AMIs—can be repurposed by an attacker as a stealthy Remote Access Trojan (RAT). It describes two primary abuse scenarios (hijacking agent registration to an attacker AWS account and running a parallel/malicious agent process via namespaces or container mode), a mock-server proxy approach to avoid AWS visibility, detection indicators (multiple instance data directories, multiple amazon-ssm-agent processes, CloudTrail Session Manager events), and defensive recommendations including removing SSM from AV/EDR allow-lists, integrating detections into SIEM/SOAR, and restricting Systems Manager access via VPC Endpoints and endpoint policies.