One of the greatest, yet seemingly unknown, dangers that face any cloud-based application is the deadly combination of an SSRF vulnerability and the AWS Metadata endpoint. As this write up from Brian Krebbs explains, the breach at Capital One was caused by an SSRF vulnerability that was able to reach the AWS Metadata endpoint and extract the temporary security credentials associated with the EC2 instance's IAM Role.

With over 15 years in information security, I feel like I've seen it all. And while I can't claim to be a great penetration tester myself, I can say that I work with some truly talented pentesters. I can also feel confident stating that I've read more pentest reports than most. So, having this background… I get asked by businesses and defenders all the time, "What advice would you give?" and, "What lessons can be learned?"