Full Report
Learn about our investigation regarding unauthorized access to our QA and product testing environment.
Analysis Summary
# Incident Report: Unauthorized Access to Huntress QA Environment
## Executive Summary
In October 2021, an unauthorized actor gained access to a Windows virtual machine within the Huntress Quality Assurance (QA) environment. The attacker leveraged brute-forced RDP credentials on a misconfigured test instance that failed to terminate as intended. There was no compromise of customer data, production systems, or source code due to strict environment segmentation.
## Incident Details
- **Discovery Date:** October 17, 2021
- **Incident Date:** Week of October 13, 2021
- **Affected Organization:** Huntress
- **Sector:** Cybersecurity / Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
- **Geography:** Global (Cloud-based infrastructure)
## Timeline of Events
### Initial Access
- **Date/Time:** Week of October 13, 2021
- **Vector:** External Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Brute Force
- **Details:** An automated provisioning failure caused 37 ephemeral Windows test VMs to remain active ("orphaned") instead of terminating after 15 minutes. These VMs had RDP (Port 3389) exposed to the internet with weak credentials.
### Lateral Movement
- **Movement:** None. The environment was a purposely segmented AWS network isolated from production systems, internal source code, and billing data.
### Data Exfiltration/Impact
- **Impact:** No data exfiltration occurred. The compromised instance was used by the attacker as a proxy to scan other public IP addresses for open RDP ports.
### Detection & Response
- **Discovery:** Huntress received an abuse notification from AWS regarding an instance performing internet-wide port scanning.
- **Response actions taken:** The Huntress team identified the 37 orphaned VMs and immediately terminated them. An investigation was launched to confirm the scope of the breach and the integrity of the production environment.
## Attack Methodology
- **Initial Access:** Brute Force (Password Spraying/Guessing)
- **Persistence:** Not maintained (Instance was ephemeral by design, though orphaned longer than intended)
- **Privilege Escalation:** Use of default/administrative credentials (`Administrator / abc123!!!`)
- **Defense Evasion:** None reported; the activity was noisy enough to trigger AWS abuse alerts
- **Credential Access:** Brute-forcing weak, non-production credentials
- **Discovery:** Public internet scanning for open ports (3389)
- **Lateral Movement:** Blocked by network segmentation
- **Collection:** N/A
- **Exfiltration:** N/A
- **Impact:** Resource hijacking for secondary attacks (Port scanning)
## Impact Assessment
- **Financial:** Negligible; limited to the compute cost of orphaned AWS instances.
- **Data Breach:** None. No customer or proprietary data was accessed.
- **Operational:** None. Production services remained unaffected.
- **Reputational:** Minimal/Positive; Huntress chose full transparency despite no legal requirement to disclose.
## Indicators of Compromise
- **Network indicators:** Outbound traffic on port 3389 to various public IPs from the QA VPC.
- **File indicators:** Not disclosed.
- **Behavioral indicators:** Failed login attempts followed by a successful RDP login; unusual outbound scanning activity from a Windows test host.
## Response Actions
- **Containment:** Immediate termination of all 37 orphaned virtual machines.
- **Eradication:** Correction of the automated provisioning script to ensure instances terminate regardless of test results.
- **Recovery:** Hardening of QA environment access controls.
## Lessons Learned
- **Orphaned Assets:** Ephemeral infrastructure requires robust "fail-safe" termination mechanisms to prevent orphaned assets from becoming permanent liabilities.
- **Security vs. Convenience:** Opening RDP/SSH to the world for "debugging convenience" in QA is a significant risk, even in segmented environments.
- **Credential Hygiene:** Even temporary test environments must utilize strong, unique credentials or key-based authentication.
## Recommendations
- **Zero Trust Access:** Implement a VPN or Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) to access QA environments rather than exposing RDP to the public internet.
- **Automated Reaping:** Implement a secondary "reaper" script or AWS Lambda function to identify and kill instances exceeding a specific age (e.g., >1 hour).
- **Hardened Images:** Ensure all base images used in QA are pre-hardened and do not contain default or weak credentials.