Lateral movement risks in the cloud and how to prevent them – Part 2: from compromised container to cloud takeover

The report analyzes Kubernetes-to-cloud lateral movement techniques across EKS, GKE, and AKS—covering IMDS abuse, pod-assigned IAM/AAD identities, long-term cloud keys, and pod escape—contrasts default provider permissions and configurations, cites prevalence of risky practices, and recommends six mitigations (e.g., blocking IMDS access, adopting Pod Security Admission, enforcing strict RBAC, avoiding long-term keys, remediating exposed container vulnerabilities, and applying network policies) to minimize cloud blast radius.