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latest/meta-data/

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You will hopefully find this site is well-secured and I'm not interested in being hacked. I'm interested in learning about how people try to hack me, though.

What is this endpoint?

latest/meta-data/

AWS EC2 Instance Metadata Service path, a classic SSRF target for stealing IAM credentials

What an attacker could do

This is the cloud instance-metadata endpoint. Through an SSRF flaw an attacker can reach it to steal temporary IAM credentials and pivot into the wider cloud account.

How to defend it

Enforce IMDSv2 (token-required) on EC2, lower the metadata hop limit, and validate or deny server-side requests to link-local addresses such as 169.254.169.254.

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Learn More

Want to dive deeper into this topic? Check out the official documentation.

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