CRITICAL ALERT CVE-2026-7241 CVSS 9.5 2 days ago

Ransomware Cartel Exploits AWS IMDSv2 Token Relay via Next.js Server Actions SSRF to Compromise Cloud Accounts

By Sarah Jenkins (Cloud Threat Researcher, BlueCiphr)

          60-SECOND EXECUTIVE TL;DR
        

Server-Side Request Forgery in unvalidated Server Action redirects enabled internal AWS metadata harvesting.

Attackers bypassed IMDSv2 PUT header restrictions by chaining an open-redirect hop with SSRF.
Harvested IAM instance profile credentials allowing lateral movement to cloud datastores and database backups.
Impacted over 80 SaaS enterprise platforms running modern full-stack JavaScript architectures.

Immediate Mitigation: Enforce hop-limit 1 on AWS IMDSv2 and whitelist destination URLs strictly within Server Action handlers.

Cloud security analysts have unraveled an ongoing cyber espionage and ransomware campaign targeting full-stack cloud applications. The threat actors exploit unvalidated destination URLs passed to modern server framework functions. By chaining this SSRF with an internal cloud gateway hop, they successfully fetch short-lived AWS IAM instance metadata credentials and exfiltrate customer databases. ### Mitigation Steps ```bash # Enforce IMDSv2 Hop Limit to 1 to prevent container proxy relay aws ec2 modify-instance-metadata-options \ --instance-id i-0123456789abcdef0 \ --http-tokens required \ --http-put-response-hop-limit 1 ```

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