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What the AWS outage taught CIOs about preparedness
When the AWS US East 1 region went dark in October, it created a ripple effect that reached far beyond cloud workloads. Atlassian tools, home monitoring systems, communication platforms and even school websites became unavailable within minutes. None of these failures resulted from an attack nor reflected a lack of backup architecture. They represented a growing challenge for CIOs stemming from the unseen dependencies that now sit underneath critical business functions.
For many organizations, the event felt like a cyber incident even though it wasn’t, but it raised a difficult question for CIOs about how to prepare for a disruption that lives outside your infrastructure, yet carries the same operational and reputational consequences as a security breach.
Amazon Threat Intelligence identifies Russian cyber threat group targeting Western critical infrastructure
As we conclude 2025, Amazon Threat Intelligence is sharing insights about a years-long Russian state-sponsored campaign that represents a significant evolution in critical infrastructure targeting: a tactical pivot where what appear to be misconfigured customer network edge devices became the primary initial access vector, while vulnerability exploitation activity declined. This tactical adaptation enables the same operational outcomes, credential harvesting, and lateral movement into victim organizations’ online services and infrastructure, while reducing the actor’s exposure and resource expenditure.
Going into 2026, organizations must prioritize securing their network edge devices and monitoring for credential replay attacks to defend against this persistent threat. Based on infrastructure overlaps with known Sandworm (also known as APT44 and Seashell Blizzard) operations observed in Amazon’s telemetry and consistent targeting patterns, we assess with high confidence this activity cluster is associated with Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU). The campaign demonstrates sustained focus on Western critical infrastructure, particularly the energy sector, with operations spanning 2021 through the present day.
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Russian GRU hackers target network edge devices in sustained energy and critical infrastructure attacks
Amazon Threat Intelligence detailed a prolonged Russian state-sponsored campaign that marked a notable shift in tactics for targeting critical infrastructure, with a particular focus on the energy sector. In this evolution, misconfigured customer network edge devices have become the primary entry point, while the exploitation of vulnerabilities has decreased. The shift allows the attackers to achieve similar operational objectives, such as credential harvesting and lateral movement into victim organizations’ online services and infrastructure, while minimizing their exposure and resource consumption.
The main targets of the campaign are energy sector organizations in Western nations, critical infrastructure providers in North America and Europe, and organizations utilizing cloud-hosted network infrastructure. The campaign commonly targets enterprise routers and routing infrastructure. It also focuses on VPN concentrators and remote access gateways, network management appliances, collaboration and wiki platforms, and cloud-based project management systems.
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