Training applications like OWASP Juice Shop, DVWA, Hackazon, and bWAPP pose cloud security risks when publicly exposed with excessive IAM permissions. Exposed training apps enable attackers to pivot from educational environments into production systems through connected cloud identities.
Pentera Labs found 60% of nearly 2,000 instances hosted in enterprise AWS, Azure, and GCP accounts rather than isolated labs, compromising resource availability and enabling lateral movement.
Exposed Training Apps Deployment Risks
These tools deploy with intentional vulnerabilities for security training, but public internet exposure in production tenants creates real attack vectors. Default configurations lack network isolation, while associated service accounts inherit broad IAM roles from development workflows. Attackers exploit known flaws and weak credentials to deploy miners consuming compute capacity and webshells establishing command access, degrading legitimate workload performance across shared infrastructure.
Active Exploitation Evidence
Pentera confirmed compromise artifacts in 20% of analyzed instances, including cryptocurrency miners, persistence mechanisms, and backdoors. Fortune 500 organizations alongside vendors Palo Alto Networks, F5, and Cloudflare host affected deployments. Organized campaigns scan public endpoints for these application signatures, confirming automated exploitation at scale beyond theoretical risks.
No CVEs apply to deliberate insecure designs.
Cloud Provider Exposure
Customer infrastructure dominates hosting patterns observed by Pentera.
| Cloud Provider | Share | Compromise Signs |
|---|---|---|
| AWS | 40% | Mining, webshells |
| Azure | 20% | Persistence |
| GCP | 15% | Backdoors |
Shadow IT Oversights
Training environments evade governance as temporary assets, skipping monitoring, access reviews, and cleanup. Shadow IT enables rapid spin-up outside policy controls, persisting post-use with production privileges. Public exposure facilitates discovery via search engines and scanners, amplifying blast radius when IAM credentials enable tenant-wide operations.
Control Requirements
Implement resource inventory scanning, enforce least-privilege IAM universally, segment lab networks, and automate temporary environment deletion. Behavioral monitoring detects mining patterns regardless of system labeling.
Exposed training apps convert security education tools into Fortune 500 cloud compromise gateways. Pentera research highlights isolation and governance needs across all cloud deployments.
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