Hundreds of leaked AWS keys give full control over corporate accounts

More than 9,300 Amazon Web Services (AWS) access keys publicly exposed between August 2022 and August 2026 are still active and valid.

Truffle Security has been tracking this exposure for the past four years and says that 817 of the exposed keys were linked to companies, 526 of them being AWS root keys.

According to the researchers, 242 of the keys are associated with Identity and Access Management (IAM) users with the AdministratorAccess policy. This role has full permissions to create, modify, delete, and view virtually all AWS services and resources within an account.

They note that each key of the 768 live keys in the two sets “full control of a company's AWS account.”

The company found 431,875 AWS secrets across code repositories, Git history, datasets, Docker images, registries, and CI logs and extracted 64,024 unique AWS keys that corresponded to 50,654 AWS accounts after removing duplicates.