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T1496.004 Cloud Service Hijacking

Adversaries may leverage compromised software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications to complete resource-intensive tasks, which may impact hosted service availability.

For example, adversaries may leverage email and messaging services, such as AWS Simple Email Service (SES), AWS Simple Notification Service (SNS), SendGrid, and Twilio, in order to send large quantities of spam / Phishing emails and SMS messages.251 Alternatively, they may engage in LLMJacking by leveraging reverse proxies to hijack the power of cloud-hosted AI models.43

In some cases, adversaries may leverage services that the victim is already using. In others, particularly when the service is part of a larger cloud platform, they may first enable the service.4 Leveraging SaaS applications may cause the victim to incur significant financial costs, use up service quotas, and otherwise impact availability.

Item Value
ID T1496.004
Sub-techniques T1496.001, T1496.002, T1496.003, T1496.004
Tactics TA0040
Platforms SaaS
Version 1.0
Created 25 September 2024
Last Modified 15 April 2025

References

  1. Alex Delamotte. (2024, February 15). SNS Sender | Active Campaigns Unleash Messaging Spam Through the Cloud. Retrieved September 25, 2024. ↩

  2. Invictus Incident Response. (2024, January 31). The curious case of DangerDev@protonmail.me. Retrieved March 19, 2024. ↩

  3. Lacework Labs. (2024, June 6). Detecting AI resource-hijacking with Composite Alerts. Retrieved September 25, 2024. ↩

  4. LLMjacking: Stolen Cloud Credentials Used in New AI Attack. (2024, May 6). Alessandro Brucato. Retrieved September 25, 2024. ↩↩

  5. Nathan Eades. (2023, January 12). SES-pionage. Retrieved September 25, 2024. ↩