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Amazon Threat Intelligence and other sources have identified a multi-year cyber campaign attributed to Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), specifically the Sandworm group (also known as APT44 and Seashell Blizzard), targeting Western critical infrastructure. The campaign, active since at least 2021, has evolved to focus on exploiting misconfigured customer network edge devices as the primary initial access vector, rather than relying on traditional vulnerability exploitation. This shift allows attackers to harvest credentials and move laterally within victim organizations, with a particular emphasis on the energy sector across North America, Europe, and the Middle East. AWS reports that their telemetry has observed overlapping infrastructure with known Sandworm operations, and that the attackers have been able to compromise cloud services by intercepting credentials in transit, often due to misconfigured edge devices.
Security experts warn that many organizations remain vulnerable due to the prevalence of misconfigured edge computing platforms, which can be exploited to gain unauthorized access to cloud services and sensitive infrastructure. AWS has been able to thwart and remediate many of these attacks within its own environment, but urges all organizations to audit and secure their network edge devices and monitor for credential replay attacks. The campaign demonstrates a tactical evolution by Russian state-linked actors, reducing their exposure and resource expenditure while maintaining operational effectiveness against high-value targets in the energy and critical infrastructure sectors.
TTPs, infrastructure, and targeting history in one profile.
9 events from the most recent confirmed update back to the earliest known activity.
Following the disclosure, AWS and cited partners including Bitdefender published indicators of compromise and recommended actions such as auditing edge devices, isolating management interfaces, enabling MFA, and monitoring for credential replay. The guidance warned that similar tactics could affect environments beyond AWS.
On December 15, 2025, AWS publicly disclosed the years-long campaign targeting Western critical infrastructure and cloud-connected environments. The report described the shift to misconfiguration abuse, listed exploited CVEs, and emphasized that the observed compromises stemmed from customer-managed device weaknesses rather than AWS service flaws.
Amazon said it notified affected customers, enabled remediation of compromised EC2-hosted appliances, and disrupted active operations associated with the threat cluster. The company also shared intelligence with partners, vendors, and in some reporting law enforcement.
Amazon Threat Intelligence assessed with high confidence in 2025 that the activity was tied to Russia's GRU based on infrastructure overlaps with Sandworm, also known as APT44 and Seashell Blizzard. Reporting also noted overlap with the Curly COMrades cluster in post-compromise activity and tradecraft.
After compromising edge devices, the operators used packet capture and traffic interception to harvest credentials in transit, then replayed those credentials against online services for persistent access and lateral movement. Amazon also observed use of legitimate compromised servers as proxy infrastructure to reduce detection risk.
By 2024, and increasingly through 2025, the campaign shifted away from primarily exploiting software vulnerabilities and toward abusing misconfigured network edge devices with exposed management interfaces. Targeted devices included routers, VPN gateways, firewalls, and other customer-managed appliances, including some hosted on AWS EC2.
In 2023, the threat activity also leveraged Veeam vulnerability CVE-2023-27532, alongside continued abuse of other enterprise software flaws. Reporting also cites exploitation of Confluence CVE-2023-22518 as part of this vulnerability-driven phase.
During the earlier phase of the campaign, the operators used known vulnerabilities including CVE-2021-26084 in Atlassian Confluence and later CVE-2022-26318 in WatchGuard appliances to compromise victim environments. These intrusions supported credential theft and follow-on access into cloud-connected infrastructure.
By 2021, a Russia-linked cyber campaign later attributed with high confidence to the GRU was active against organizations in North America, Europe, and the Middle East, especially in the energy sector. Additional targets included telecommunications, technology, managed security, collaboration, and source code hosting environments.
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