At AWS, we’ve spent decades developing processes and tools that enable us to defend millions of customers simultaneously, wherever they operate around the world. AI has been an extremely helpful addition to the automation our security and threat intelligence teams do every day, and we’re still early in this journey. Our AI-powered log analysis system has reduced the time SecOps engineers spend analyzing security logs from an average of six hours to just seven minutes, a 50x productivity increase that lets us detect and respond to threats faster than ever. Across AWS, we analyze over 400 trillion network flows per day to detect patterns that signal emerging threats. In 2025 alone, we blocked over 300 million attempts to maliciously encrypt customer files hosted on Amazon S3. At this scale, every improvement in our operations helps protect all customers. AI is already helping us make our defenses stronger for everyone, and I’m excited to see that improvement continue.

Today, Anthropic announced Project Glasswing, a cybersecurity initiative designed to secure the world’s most critical software and advance the cybersecurity practices the industry will need as AI grows more capable. Organizations that build or maintain critical digital infrastructure are getting early access to Claude Mythos Preview, a new class of AI model, to find and patch vulnerabilities in the systems the world depends on. Given our role in securing some of the world’s most essential infrastructure, AWS is playing an integral part in advancing this work.

As part of Project Glasswing, we’ve already applied Claude Mythos Preview to critical AWS codebases that undergo continuous AI-powered security reviews, and even in those well-tested environments, it’s helped us identify additional opportunities to strengthen our code. In our internal testing, Claude Mythos Preview has proven more productive than previous models at surfacing security findings, requiring less manual guidance from our engineers to deliver actionable results. We’ve also given early access to a select group of AWS customers, who are deploying Claude Mythos Preview in their own security workflows and helping shape how the model evolves.

As AI tools grow more powerful in their ability to identify security issues, so must our ability to use them defensively. To that end, we’ve been working closely with Anthropic to help ensure Claude Mythos Preview is ready for enterprise use. AWS is Anthropic’s primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, safety research, and foundation model development. More broadly, AWS provides the foundational infrastructure that the world’s leading AI companies rely on to build, train, and deploy their most advanced models. We’re bringing decades of security experience to this partnership, helping to ensure Claude Mythos Preview is ready for even more organizations to build upon and operate securely at scale.

Claude Mythos Preview signals an upcoming wave of models that can find vulnerabilities and build working exploits at a scale and speed we haven’t seen before. Anthropic and AWS are taking a deliberately cautious approach to release. Access begins with a small number of organizations, prioritizing internet-critical companies and open-source maintainers whose software and digital services impact hundreds of millions of users. The goal: find and fix vulnerabilities in the world’s most critical software. Claude Mythos Preview is available in gated research preview through Amazon Bedrock with enterprise-grade security controls, including customer-managed encryption, VPC isolation, and detailed logging, so your team can explore Claude Mythos Preview’s capabilities without exposing production assets to unnecessary risk.

Our work with Project Glasswing is grounded in a philosophy we’ve developed over two decades of securing mission-critical workloads: you can’t wait for threats to materialize before building your defenses. You have to look around corners, adopt new technologies, build protections first, deploy them in your own operations at scale, and refine them based on what you learn.

That’s exactly what we’ve done at AWS with AI and security. Our approach spans the full spectrum: proactive defense through threat hunting and vulnerability research, dynamic response to active campaigns, and third-party certifications that verify our security practices meet the highest industry standards. This operational experience has taught us where AI accelerates security work and where human judgment remains essential. And it’s reinforced that security innovation must be pragmatic: proven in production before we ask you to rely on it.

That’s also why we help define what secure AI looks like. We became the first major cloud provider to achieve ISO 42001 certification for AI services. We’re active participants in OWASP, the Coalition for Secure AI, and the Frontier Model Forum. And we co-founded the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) to enable better threat intelligence sharing across the ecosystem. The AWS Nitro System provides mathematically proven isolation for workloads. Systems and services like KMS, Nitro, EKS, and Lambda are designed with zero-operator access architectures, meaning AWS personnel can’t access your data. These aren’t aspirational goals. They’re how we operate today, at scale, every day.

Amazon Bedrock is where these principles come to life for AI. Bedrock provides policy-enforced access controls, built-in evaluation tools to measure how effectively models identify and validate vulnerabilities, and the ability to run workloads inside your own virtual private cloud. AWS is also the first cloud provider to achieve FedRAMP High and Department of Defense Security Requirements Guide Impact Level 4 and 5 authorizations for generally available Claude foundation models. Amazon Bedrock is already where the most security-sensitive organizations trust Anthropic’s technology, and it makes perfect sense for Claude Mythos Preview.

The same principles that guide our work at AWS scale apply regardless of which AI tools you’re using: comprehensive observability, defense in depth, automation where it adds value, and human judgment where it’s essential. Here’s how to put them into practice.

Prepare for the next generation of AI security. Claude Mythos Preview signals an upcoming wave of AI models that will transform cybersecurity. Start strengthening your security posture now so your organization is ready as these capabilities become more broadly available. Claude Mythos Preview is available in gated preview through Amazon Bedrock, and access is limited to an initial allow-list of organizations. If your organization has been allow-listed, your AWS account team will reach out directly.

Run on-demand penetration testing with AWS Security Agent. Now generally available, AWS Security Agent delivers autonomous penetration testing that operates 24/7 at a fraction of the cost of manual penetration tests. It transforms penetration testing from a periodic bottleneck into an on-demand capability that scales with your development velocity across AWS, Azure, GCP, other cloud providers, and on-premises. AWS Security Agent represents a new class of frontier agents: autonomous systems that work independently to achieve goals, scale to tackle concurrent tasks, and run persistently without constant human oversight. It deploys specialized AI agents to discover, validate, and report security vulnerabilities through sophisticated multi-step scenarios. Unlike traditional scanners that generate findings without validation, AWS Security Agent identifies potential vulnerabilities, then attempts to exploit them with targeted payloads and attack chains to confirm they are legitimate security risks. Each finding includes CVSS risk scores, application-specific severity ratings, detailed reproduction steps, and remediation suggestions. The result: penetration testing that once took weeks now completes in hours, scales across your entire application portfolio, and helps you get started with remediation instead of leaving you with a report. New customers can explore AWS Security Agent with a 2-month free trial.

Build AI applications you can trust with Amazon Bedrock. For teams building with generative AI, the challenge isn’t just making AI work, it’s making AI work safely. Amazon Bedrock provides the security and safety controls you need to deploy AI responsibly. Its Automated Reasoning capability is the first and only AI safeguard to use formal logic to help prevent factual errors from hallucinations, providing verifiable explanations with 99% accuracy, a capability we’ve refined over more than a decade of applying formal methods across AWS storage, identity, and networking. Amazon Bedrock also provides customizable guardrails that block harmful content and enforce your content policies, along with comprehensive observability to track AI behavior and detect anomalies across your workloads.

The threat landscape isn’t waiting for us to catch up. Nation-state actors, ransomware operators, and supply chain attackers are already using AI to scale their operations. Our job is to stay ahead by building defenses first, deploying them at scale, and sharing what we learn so the entire community benefits.

That’s what we do every day at AWS. We build in security from the start, ensuring it works and scales before we ask customers to rely on it. We set standards rather than follow them. And we look around corners to address tomorrow’s challenges today.

As AI capabilities continue to evolve, this approach won’t change. We’ll keep building defenses first, refining them at scale, and working with partners like Anthropic to ensure the next generation of AI security tools meets the real-world needs of enterprises defending at this scale.

• Get started with AWS Security Agent
• Explore Amazon Bedrock Guardrails for AI content safety
• See how we’re Securing AI at AWS
• Learn about AWS Responsible AI
• Read about AWS AI Compliance
• Review our AWS Security Bulletins on emerging threats

Agentic AI represents a qualitative shift in how software operates. Traditional software executes deterministic instructions. Generative AI responds to human prompts with output that humans review and use at their discretion. Agentic AI differs from both. Agents connect to software tools and APIs and uses large language models (LLMs) as reasoning engines to plan and execute sequences of actions autonomously—at machine speed—with real-world consequences. This shift raises new questions for information security. In January 2026, NIST’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) issued a Request for Information (RFI) seeking industry input on how to secure these systems. AWS submitted a response grounded in our experience building and operating agentic AI services. This post summarizes the four security principles at the heart of that response and the architectural building blocks that implement them.

CAISI asked developers, deployers, and security researchers to weigh in on how the industry should secure AI systems that act autonomously. The RFI posed questions across five areas. What unique security considerations do agentic systems introduce, and how do those considerations change as systems gain more autonomy? What practices improve security during development and deployment? How do organizations assess the security of their agentic systems? How can deployment environments be constrained and monitored? And where should the industry focus future research?

Even a conservative risk/benefit analysis will conclude that the benefits of agentic AI clearly outweigh the risks in many domains. The rapid adoption of agentic technology across business and government confirms this. But agents are valuable precisely because of their autonomy and adaptability, and these same characteristics create the security challenge. An agentic system that carries out an unintended action can do so at machine speed, before a human can intervene. Unlike human actors who pause or escalate when something seems unusual, agents might not inherently recognize ambiguities that are evident to humans, nor intuitively grasp unstated policy boundaries.

The good news, however, is that the security response to agentic AI doesn’t need to start from scratch. Existing security frameworks, including the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and the Secure Software Development Framework, remain relevant and should be extended for agent-specific considerations rather than replaced. The most important extension is architectural. Our response to NIST identified four foundational security principles that address how to make that extension.

These principles build on the premise that agentic AI doesn’t require a new security paradigm, but it does require existing practices to evolve. The first two principles address what carries forward; the second two address what is genuinely new.

Principle 1: Secure development lifecycle practices apply across system components. Agentic AI systems combine traditional software components (APIs, databases, orchestration logic) with AI elements such as foundation models, prompt templates, and retrieval pipelines. A secure development lifecycle must cover both sets of components. For traditional components, established practices such as code review, static analysis, dependency scanning, and threat modeling remain essential, keeping in mind that those practices are also in the process of being enhanced with AI-based tooling. For AI components, the challenge is different. Foundation models are probabilistic, which means traditional regression testing is necessary but not sufficient. Organizations must supplement it with behavioral testing, adversarial evaluation, and continuous monitoring to validate that AI components operate within expected parameters.

Regular re-evaluation is equally important for addressing behavioral drift. Models receive updates that can alter behavior. Prompt templates evolve as teams refine agent capabilities. New tools and data sources expand the agent’s operational surface. Each change can introduce new failure modes or potential security issues. Organizations must treat evaluation as an ongoing operational practice, not a one-time gate. This includes automated testing after model updates, red team exercises against deployed agents, and monitoring that detects behavioral drift over time.

Principle 2: Traditional security controls remain fully applicable. Agentic AI introduces new considerations, but it doesn’t render existing security risks obsolete. The full complement of traditional security controls still applies. An agentic AI system combines traditional software with the new LLM-plus-tools processing loop. Organizations must secure existing software, tools, and configurations against well-known risks to provide a sound foundation for the agentic elements.

Privilege escalation, confused deputy issues, session hijacking, code injection, and supply chain risks extend directly into agentic systems. Some of these risks increase in agentic contexts. Agents operate at greater scale and speed than human actors, which means excessive privileges carry more potential for unintended consequences. That means that applying principles of least privilege to access management in an agentic context is as important—if not more so—than in traditional systems. The supply chain surface is also broader. Agentic systems consume not only third-party code dependencies but also foundation models, plugins, tool servers, and data retrieval sources. Agents that invoke APIs, query databases, or generate code create new potential injection surfaces at tool boundaries. AI-specific controls must be additions to this foundational security, not replacements for it.

Principle 3: Deterministic external controls are the starting point for agentic security. This is the most important architectural principle for agentic AI security. Organizations should enforce security through deterministic, infrastructure-level controls external to the agent’s reasoning loop, not through the agent’s own reasoning, internal guardrails, or prompt-based instructions. The logic is straightforward. LLMs are probabilistic reasoning engines, not security enforcement mechanisms. Developers can instruct an LLM to refuse certain requests, but prompt injection techniques can override those instructions. An LLM can be told to respect access boundaries, but it has no reliable mechanism to enforce them. Attempting to constrain agent behavior only through prompting or alignment runs against the fundamental value proposition of agents, which is their ability to adapt dynamically to novel situations.

Effective security places fully specified, deterministic controls outside the agent that govern which tools it can access, what operations it can perform, and what data it can reach. Model manipulation cannot bypass these controls. We describe this as the security box. It’s external to the agent, deterministic in its enforcement, and comprehensive in its coverage. Every interaction between the agent and the outside world passes through it. The Agentic AI Security Scoping Matrix helps organizations calibrate the rigor of these controls based on their system’s autonomy level. Scopes range from systems that require explicit human approval before every action to fully autonomous systems that initiate their own activities based on external events.

The security box isn’t a limitation on the agent’s value. It’s the precondition for achieving that value responsibly. As agentic technology matures, the box itself will likely evolve to include agentic elements. Specialized AI agents designed to control the scope of other agents might replace some deterministic constraints over time, using new information and context to make more appropriate automated decisions than could be achieved by humans managing complex deterministic controls.

Principle 4: Greater autonomy should be earned through ongoing evaluation. Organizations should expand agent autonomy progressively based on demonstrated performance, not grant it by default. The starting point is human decision-making for high-consequence operations. When an agent encounters an action that could modify high-value production data, initiate financial transactions, or communicate sensitive information externally, a human makes the final decision. The agent recommends, and a human approves or rejects.

This approach carries a well-known risk. If every agent action requires human approval, the volume of decisions might overwhelm reviewers. Approval becomes reflexive rather than deliberate, shifting liability to humans who have been placed in a position to fail. Organizations must scope human oversight to genuinely high-consequence operations and resist the temptation to require human-in-the-loop designs for routine actions that carry low risk.

The path from human oversight to expanded autonomy runs through evaluation. As organizations systematically record what the agent recommended, what the human decided, and what actually happened, they build the evidence base for expanding autonomy. When data shows sustained alignment, organizations can shift from prior approval to after-the-fact review, and eventually to full autonomy for specific operation types. This progression should happen at the operation or workflow level, not across a broad range of unrelated tasks.

This progression isn’t one-way. Organizations should be prepared to reintroduce human oversight when evidence warrants it. Some deterministic boundaries likely remain permanent for the foreseeable future. These boundaries exist not because the agent hasn’t earned trust, but because the consequences of certain actions are unacceptable under a reasonable risk analysis. The overall model is one of earned autonomy through demonstrated competence, governed by evaluation, bounded by permanent constraints, and subject to continuous review. There might come a time with specialized boundary agents can provide better outcomes than purely deterministic controls, but that option can only emerge over time from experience and evaluation.

The four principles define the goals. Achieving them requires specific architectural building blocks that compose the security box and the broader security architecture. Our response to NIST described these building blocks in greater detail. Here we provide a summary. AWS has implemented them in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, a framework for building, deploying, and operating agentic AI systems with security built in from the ground up.

Compute isolation. Agent compute environments must isolate execution, prevent cross-agent data leakage, and contain agents within defined boundaries. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore runs agents on Firecracker, an open source virtual machine manager written in Rust. Firecracker provides lightweight micro-VMs backed by Linux KVM and hardware-based virtualization, delivering the speed of containers with the isolation properties of full virtual machines. Key security-critical elements of Firecracker have been formally verified by AWS teams, adding assurance beyond the memory safety that Rust provides.

Identity and access management. Agents require their own identities, secure credential storage, and least-privilege authorization enforced at the infrastructure level. AgentCore Identity provides machine identities for agents, manages OAuth and secure credential flows, and integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for fine-grained access control. It supports attribute-based access control and maintains traceable delegation chains so that the relationship between agent actions and the invoking user remains auditable.

Tool access and policy enforcement. Every tool an agent can access expands both its usefulness and its potential risk. Managing tool access individually across agents creates an unmanageable combinatorial explosion. AgentCore Gateway acts as a centralized intermediary between agents and tools, enforcing authentication and authorization at a single control point. It can inspect tool calls down to individual parameters, not just at the API level. AgentCore Policy, built on the open source Cedar authorization language, adds formally verified policy enforcement. Teams can author Cedar policies in natural language and then review them, combining the flexibility of LLMs with the rigor of formal methods.

Observability. Observability infrastructure must capture sufficient context for real-time monitoring and investigation, and it must be protected from the agents it monitors. Organizations wouldn’t allow employees to edit their own audit logs, and the same principle applies to agents. AgentCore provides observability through the AgentCore Gateway, session-level telemetry, and detailed traces that record internal state changes. These capabilities can extend to agents running outside of AgentCore as well.

Model execution environment. The security of the model execution environment matters as much as the security of the agent itself. Amazon Bedrock runs models in isolated network environments where neither AWS nor model providers access customer prompts and responses. When customers enable logging, those logs are encrypted at rest and protected by customer-managed encryption keys. This architectural isolation is a key reason government and enterprise customers have adopted Amazon Bedrock.

Deterministic external controls are complemented by controls within the AI processing loop. Amazon Bedrock Guardrails inspects prompts and responses using small AI models called classifiers that address challenges such as prompt injection. Automated Reasoning checks go further, so that developers can create a formal model of a knowledge domain and verify that LLM output conforms to it, producing results that are deterministic and provably correct.

Agentic AI changes how software operates, but the security response builds on decades of established practice. Existing frameworks provide the right foundation. The task is to extend existing frameworks for agent-specific considerations. Organizations should apply secure development lifecycle practices to AI components and maintain traditional security controls. They should enforce security through deterministic controls external to the agent and earn greater autonomy through systematic evaluation.

These principles aren’t theoretical. They reflect the operational experience AWS has gained building and operating agentic AI services. They’re embedded in how we design our infrastructure. As NIST develops guidance based on industry input, we will continue to invest in helping customers build and operate agentic AI systems with confidence.

To learn more about how AWS helps customers secure their AI workloads, visit the AWS AI Security or read the Amazon response to the CAISI Request for Information regarding Security Considerations for Artificial Intelligence Agents.

Amazon threat intelligence has identified an active Interlock ransomware campaign exploiting CVE-2026-20131, a critical vulnerability in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC) Software that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary Java code as root on an affected device, which was disclosed by Cisco on March 4, 2026.

After Cisco’s disclosure, Amazon threat intelligence began research into this vulnerability using Amazon MadPot’s global sensor network—a system of honeypot servers that attract and monitor cybercriminal activity. While looking for any current or past exploits of this vulnerability, our research found that Interlock was exploiting this vulnerability 36 days before its public disclosure, beginning January 26, 2026. This wasn’t just another vulnerability exploit, Interlock had a zero-day in their hands, giving them a week’s head start to compromise organizations before defenders even knew to look. Upon making this discovery, we shared our findings with Cisco to help support their investigation and protect customers.

A misconfigured infrastructure server—essentially, a poorly secured staging area used by the attackers—exposed Interlock’s complete operational toolkit. This rare mistake provided Amazon’s security teams with visibility into the ransomware group’s multi-stage attack chain, custom remote access trojans (backdoor programs that give attackers control of compromised systems), reconnaissance scripts (automated tools for mapping victim networks), and evasion techniques.

AWS infrastructure and customer workloads on AWS were not observed to be involved in this campaign. This advisory shares comprehensive technical analysis and indicators of compromise to help organizations identify potential compromise and defend against Interlock’s operations. Organizations running Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center should immediately apply Cisco’s security patches and review the indicators provided below.

Amazon threat intelligence identified threat activity potentially related to CVE-2026-20131 beginning January 26, 2026, predating the public disclosure. Observed activity involved HTTP requests to a specific path in the affected software. Request bodies contained Java code execution attempts and two embedded URLs: one used to deliver configuration data supporting the exploit, and another designed to confirm successful exploitation by causing a vulnerable target to perform an HTTP PUT request and upload a generated file. Multiple variations of these URLs were observed across different exploit attempts.

To advance the investigation and obtain additional threat intelligence, we performed the expected HTTP PUT request with the anticipated file content—essentially, we pretended to be a successfully compromised system. This successfully prompted Interlock to proceed to the next stage, issuing commands to fetch and execute a malicious ELF binary (a Linux executable file) from a remote server.

When analysts retrieved the binary, they discovered the same host (attacker-controlled server) is used for distributing Interlock’s entire operational toolkit. The exposed infrastructure organized artifacts into separate paths corresponding to individual targets, with the same paths used for both downloading tools to compromised hosts and uploading operational artifacts back to the staging server.

The ELF binary and associated artifacts are attributable to the Interlock ransomware family based on convergent technical and operational indicators. The embedded ransom note and TOR negotiation portal are consistent with Interlock’s established branding and infrastructure. The ransom note’s invocation of multiple data protection regulations reflects Interlock’s documented practice of citing regulatory exposure to pressure victims, essentially threatening organizations not just with data encryption, but with regulatory fines and compliance violations. The campaign-specific organization identifier embedded in the note aligns with Interlock’s per-victim tracking model.

Interlock has historically targeted specific sectors where operational disruption creates maximum pressure for payment. Education represents the largest share of their activity, followed by engineering, architecture, and construction firms, manufacturing and industrial organizations, healthcare providers, and government and public sector entities.

Temporal analysis performed on timestamps from observed threat activities, artifacts stored on the misconfigured infrastructure server, and metadata embedded within recovered threat artifacts indicates the actor most likely operates in UTC+3 with 75–80% confidence. Systematic analysis across all UTC offsets showed UTC+3 produced the best fit: first activity around 08:30, peak activity between 12:00 and 18:00, and a probable sleep window of 00:30–08:30.

Once Interlock gains initial access, they use a variety of priority tools to complete their attack. Amazon threat intelligence teams recovered a PowerShell script designed for systematic Windows environment enumeration (automated information gathering about the victim’s network). The script collects operating system and hardware details, running services, installed software, storage configuration, Hyper-V virtual machine inventory, user file listings across Desktop, Documents, and Downloads directories, browser artifacts from Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and 360 browser (including history, bookmarks, stored credentials, and extensions), active network connections correlated with responsible processes, ARP tables, iSCSI session data, and RDP authentication events from Windows event logs.

The script stages results to a centralized network share (\JK-DC2\Temp) using each system’s fully qualified hostname to create dedicated directories—essentially creating a folder for each compromised computer. Following collection, it compresses data into ZIP archives named after each hostname and removes original raw data. This structured per-host output format indicates the script operates across multiple machines within a network—a hallmark of ransomware intrusion chains that prepare for organization-wide encryption.

Remote access trojans (RATs) are malicious programs that give attackers persistent control over compromised systems, functioning like unauthorized remote desktop software.

JavaScript implant: Amazon threat intelligence recovered an obfuscated JavaScript remote access trojan that suppresses debugging output by overriding browser console methods (hiding its activity from basic detection tools). On execution, it profiles the infected host using PowerShell and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), collecting system identity, domain membership, username, OS version, and privilege context before transmitting this data during an encrypted initialization handshake.

Command-and-control communication occurs over persistent WebSocket connections with RC4-encrypted messages using per-message 16-byte random keys embedded in packet headers—essentially, each message uses a different encryption key, making interception more difficult. The implant cycles through multiple operator-controlled hostnames and IP addresses in randomized order with exponential backoff between reconnection attempts.

The implant provides interactive shell access, arbitrary command execution, bidirectional file transfer, and SOCKS5 proxy capability for tunneling TCP traffic (routing malicious traffic through other systems to hide its origin). Self-update and self-delete capabilities allow operators to replace or remove the implant without reinfection, supporting operational cleanup to hinder forensic investigation.

Java implant: A functionally equivalent client implemented in Java provides identical command-and-control capabilities. Built on GlassFish ecosystem libraries, it uses Grizzly for non-blocking I/O transport and Tyrus for WebSocket protocol communication. In simpler terms, Interlock built the same backdoor in two different programming languages, ensuring they maintain access even if defenders detect one version.

Sophisticated threat actors don’t attack from their own infrastructure, they build disposable relay networks to hide their tracks. Amazon threat intelligence teams identified a Bash script that configures Linux servers as HTTP reverse proxies (intermediary servers that forward traffic to hide the attacker’s true location). The script performs system updates, installs fail2ban with SSH brute-force protection, and compiles HAProxy 3.1.2 from source. The HAProxy instance listens on port 80 and forwards all inbound HTTP traffic to a hardcoded target IP, with systemd ensuring persistence across reboots.

A notable component is a log erasure routine running as a cron job every five minutes. The routine truncates all *.log files under /var/log and suppresses shell history by unsetting the HISTFILE variable. This aggressive evidence destruction, wiping logs every five minutes, combined with the purpose-built HTTP forwarding proxy, indicates the script establishes disposable traffic-laundering relay nodes. These nodes obscure exploit traffic origin, relay command-and-control communications, or proxy data exfiltration, making it nearly impossible to trace attacks back to their source.

Amazon threat intelligence teams observed a Java class file delivered as an alternative to the ELF binary drop. When loaded by the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), its static initializer registers a ServletRequestListener with the server’s StandardContext, essentially installing a persistent memory-resident backdoor that intercepts HTTP requests without writing files to disk. This “fileless” approach evades traditional antivirus scanning that looks for malicious files.

The listener inspects incoming requests for specially crafted parameters containing encrypted command payloads. Payloads are decrypted using AES-128 with a key derived from the MD5 hash of the hardcoded seed “geckoformboundary99fec155ea301140cbe26faf55ed2f40″ (using the first 16 characters: 09b1a8422e8faed0). Decrypted payloads are treated as compiled Java bytecode, dynamically loaded into the JVM, and executed—a technique designed to evade file-based detection by running malicious code entirely in memory.

Amazon threat intelligence teams recovered Java class files implementing a basic TCP server listening on port 45588 (encoded as Unicode character 넔 to obscure the port number from static analysis). The server accepts connections, logs connecting IP addresses, sends a greeting message, and immediately closes connections. This operational profile is consistent with a lightweight network beacon—essentially a “phone home” tool used to verify successful code execution or confirm network port reachability following initial exploitation.

Interlock deployed ConnectWise ScreenConnect, a legitimate commercial remote desktop tool, alongside custom implants. When ransomware operators deploy legitimate remote access tools alongside their custom malware, they’re buying insurance—if defenders find and remove one backdoor, they still have another way in. This indicates multiple redundant remote access mechanisms—a pattern consistent with ransomware operators seeking to maintain access even if individual footholds are removed. The tool’s legitimate network footprint helps blend with authorized remote administration traffic, making detection more challenging.

Amazon threat intelligence teams also recovered Volatility, an open-source memory forensics framework typically used by incident responders (the same tool defenders use to investigate attacks). While no artifacts indicated automated use, its presence alongside custom implants and reconnaissance scripts is consistent with advanced threat operations. Both ransomware groups and nation-state actors have been observed deploying Volatility during intrusions. The tool’s focus on parsing memory dumps provides access to sensitive data such as credentials stored in RAM, which can enable lateral movement (spreading through the network) and deeper environment compromise in support of ransom operations or espionage objectives.

Interlock also used Certify, an open source offensive security tool designed to exploit misconfigurations in Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS). For ransomware operators, Certify provides a pathway to identify vulnerable certificate templates and enrollment permissions that allow requesting authentication-capable certificates. These certificates can be used to impersonate users, escalate privileges, or maintain persistent access. These capabilities directly support both initial compromise and long-term persistence objectives in ransomware operations.

The following indicators support defensive measures by organizations that may be affected. Due to Interlock’s use of content variation techniques, most file hashes are not included as reliable indicators. The threat actor modified most artifacts like scripts and binaries downloaded to different targets. This resulted in different file hashes for functionally identical tools. The customization allowed each attack to evade signature-based detection that looks for exact file matches.

206.251.239[.]164	Exploit source IP	Active Jan 2026
199.217.98[.]153	Exploit source IP	Active Mar 2026
89.46.237[.]33	Exploit source IP	Active Mar 2026
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:136.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/136.0	Exploit HTTP User-Agent	Observed Jan 2026 and Mar 2026
b885946e72ad51dca6c70abc2f773506	Exploit TLS JA3	Observed Jan 2026 and Mar 2026
f80d3d09f61892c5846c854dd84ac403	Exploit TLS JA3	Observed Mar 2026
t13i1811h1_85036bcba153_b26ce05bbdd6	Exploit TLS JA4	Observed Jan 2026 and Mar 2026
t13i4311h1_c7886603b240_b26ce05bbdd6	Exploit TLS JA4	Observed Mar 2026
144.172.94[.]59	C2 Fallback IP	Active Mar 2026
199.217.99[.]121	C2 Fallback IP	Active Mar 2026
188.245.41[.]78	C2 Fallback IP	Active Mar 2026
144.172.110[.]106	Backend C2 IP	Active Mar 2026
95.217.22[.]175	Backend C2 IP	Active Mar 2026
37.27.244[.]222	Staging host IP	Active Mar 2026
hxxp://ebhmkoohccl45qesdbvrjqtyro2hmhkmh6vkyfyjjzfllm3ix72aqaid[.]onion/chat.php	Ransom negotiation portal	Active Mar 2026
cherryberry[.]click	Exploit Support Domain	Active Jan 2026
ms-server-default[.]com	Exploit Support Domain	Active Mar 2026
initialize-configs[.]com	Exploit Support Domain	Active Mar 2026
ms-global.first-update-server[.]com	Exploit Support Domain	Active Mar 2026
ms-sql-auth[.]com	Exploit Support Domain	Active Mar 2026
kolonialeru[.]com	Exploit Support Domain	Active Mar 2026
sclair.it[.]com	Exploit Support Domain	Active Mar 2026
browser-updater[.]com	C2 domain	Active Mar 2026
browser-updater[.]live	C2 domain	Active Mar 2026
os-update-server[.]com	C2 domain	Active Mar 2026
os-update-server[.]org	C2 domain	Active Mar 2026
os-update-server[.]live	C2 domain	Active Mar 2026
os-update-server[.]top	C2 domain	Active Mar 2026
d1caa376cb45b6a1eb3a45c5633c5ef75f7466b8601ed72c8022a8b3f6c1f3be	Offensive security tool (Certify)	Observed Mar 2026
6c8efbcef3af80a574cb2aa2224c145bb2e37c2f3d3f091571708288ceb22d5f	Screen locker	Observed Mar 2026

Organizations should take the following actions to protect against Interlock ransomware operations.

Immediate actions:

• Apply Cisco’s security patches for Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center
• Review logs for the indicators of compromise listed above
• Conduct security assessments to identify potential compromise
• Review ScreenConnect deployments for unauthorized installations

Detection opportunities:

• Monitor for PowerShell scripts staging data to network shares with hostname-based directory structures
• Detect Java ServletRequestListener registrations in web application contexts (unusual modifications to Java web applications)
• Identify HAProxy installations with aggressive log deletion cron jobs (proxy servers that erase their own logs every five minutes)
• Watch for TCP connections to unusual high-numbered ports (e.g., 45588)

Long-term measures:

• Implement defense-in-depth strategies with multiple layers of security controls
• Maintain continuous threat monitoring and hunting capabilities
• Ensure comprehensive logging with secure, centralized log storage (stored separately from systems that could be compromised)
• Regularly test incident response procedures for ransomware scenarios
• Educate security teams on Interlock’s tactics, techniques, and procedures

The real story here isn’t just about one vulnerability or one ransomware group—it’s about the fundamental challenge zero-day exploits pose to every security model. When attackers exploit vulnerabilities before patches exist, even the most diligent patching programs can’t protect you in that critical window. This is precisely why defense in depth is essential—layered security controls provide protection when any single control fails or hasn’t yet been deployed. Rapid patching remains foundational in vulnerability management, but defense in depth helps organizations not to be defenseless during the window between exploit and patch.

Amazon Threat Intelligence teams continue to monitor Interlock ransomware operations and will provide updates as additional information becomes available. The intelligence gathered from this campaign is being integrated into AWS security services to protect customers proactively.