Experts argue that the most unsettling takeaway isn’t that AI introduced a new attack technique. It is that AI removed hesitation.“When you strip this attack down to its essentials, what stands out isn’t a breakthrough technique,” said Shane Barney, CISO at Keeper Security. “It’s how little resistance the environment offered once the attacker obtained legitimate access.” He warned that AI collapses reconnaissance, privilege testing, and lateral movement into “a single, rapid sequence,” eliminating the buffer time defenders have historically relied on.
To reduce exposure, Sysdig researchers advised enforcing least privilege across IAM users, roles, and Lambda execution roles, tightly limiting permissions such as “UpdateFunctionCode” and “PassRole”, and ensuring sensitive S3 buckets are never public. Enabling Lambda versioning, turning on Amazon Bedrock model invocation logging, and monitoring for large-scale enumeration activity are also critical, they added.
