Researchers found 768 leaked AWS keys that still work, and the containment policy leaves plenty possible

Truffle Security found 768 leaked AWS keys granting full control of corporate accounts, including 526 root keys, with 88% of tested credentials still active. AWS applies a quarantine policy to keys it detects as leaked, which still permits a long list of damaging actions.

Researchers have found 768 leaked Amazon Web Services keys that still give full control of a company’s account. Among the exposed credentials were 526 root keys, the most privileged thing an AWS customer possesses.

The scale of the search explains the number. Truffle Security collected 431,875 AWS secrets from repositories, git history, datasets, Docker images and CI logs, reduced them to 64,024 unique keys, and tested those where complete credentials were available.

Most of them worked. As of 10 August, 88% of the verified keys still authenticated, out of 10,616 tested.

The largest single source was not a code host in the traditional sense. Hugging Face accounted for 8,482 unique key exposures, which is what happens when model repositories inherit the habits of software ones.

Nobody is rotating anything. The median key with a known creation date was about five years old, and only 13.7% had a newer key issued to the same user.

Amazon does react when it spots a leak. It applies a quarantine policy intended to limit fraud-related damage without, in its words, impacting existing resources, in a service where credential theft has become a recurring category.

Writing in The Register, the cloud economist Corey Quinn argues that policy leaves far too much available. Quarantined credentials can still assume other roles in the account, run commands on running instances, stop CloudTrail logging and delete the audit trail entirely.

One example stands out for permanence. Writing to a bucket is allowed, as is setting object lock and retention, so an attacker can fill storage and apply compliance-mode retention that cannot be shortened by anyone, including AWS support, without deleting the whole account.

That analysis is one practitioner’s reading of a published policy rather than a demonstrated attack. It is also a list anyone can check against Amazon’s own documentation, which is the uncomfortable part.

For European companies this lands on a specific desk. Financial entities have been subject to the Digital Operational Resilience Act since January 2025, and TNW reported that most were not ready for it.

A five-year-old root key sitting in a public dataset is precisely the third-party technology risk those rules ask firms to find and document. The rotation nobody is doing is the control the regulation assumes exists.