The Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) is being increasingly abused to send convincing phishing emails that can bypass standard security filters and render reputation-based blocks ineffective.
Although the resource has been leveraged for malicious activity in the past, the current spike may be due to a large number of AWS Identity and Access Management access keys exposed in public assets.
Because it is a legitimate, trusted resource, phishing operations can leverage Amazon SES to send out malicious emails that pass authentication checks.
Kaspersky researchers note in a report today that they’ve “observed an uptick in phishing attacks leveraging Amazon SES” to deliver links that redirect to a malicious site.
Source: Kaspersky
The researchers believe the main driver of this abuse is the increasing exposure of AWS credentials in GitHub repositories, .ENV files, Docker images, backups, and publicly accessible S3 buckets.
Finding the access…