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Unit 42: cloud-bucket hijacking via global-namespace reuse silently redirects log and replication streams `[SINGLE-SOURCE]`

From CTI Daily Brief — 2026-06-24 · published 2026-06-24

Unit 42 detailed an architectural attack abusing the global uniqueness of object-storage bucket names across AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage and (less so) Azure Blob Storage (Unit 42, 2026-06-22). An actor holding bucket-delete rights deletes a destination bucket and immediately recreates it under their own account; existing log sinks, replication jobs, Pub/Sub-to-Storage subscriptions and Data Firehose streams keep writing to the now attacker-owned bucket with no config change and no entry in the source account's audit trail. No named in-the-wild exploitation is reported — this is offensive-research surfacing of an exposure class — but the impact on audit-log integrity is exactly what a SOC's detection pipeline depends on. [SINGLE-SOURCE] (Unit 42, a vendor lab, so the national-CERT carve-out does not apply; the underlying CSP behaviours are independently verifiable). Detection: alert on storage bucket-deletion API calls (GCP storage.buckets.delete, AWS CloudTrail DeleteBucket, Azure Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/delete) and on recreation of sink/replication targets; hardening: require multi-party approval for bucket deletion, enforce GCP VPC Service Controls / AWS account-region namespace isolation, and track sensitive-bucket ownership with DSPM. Maps to T1485/T1578 (resource manipulation) and the effective outcome of T1530 (data from cloud storage).