Amazon Athena EUVD-2026-63585

The ClickHouse connector for Amazon Athena Federated Query must be deployed in the AWS account using the vulnerable template (versions prior to v2026.17.1). The attacker must hold an authenticated IAM identity with permissions to deploy or update Athena connector Lambda functions via CloudFormation or SAM - typically requiring cloudformation:CreateStack or cloudformation:UpdateStack permissions scoped to the connector stack, along with associated IAM passrole capabilities. Critically, the connector's SecretNamePrefix configuration parameter must be absent or left empty; a correctly configured non-empty SecretNamePrefix is a sufficient workaround that prevents the IAM policy from granting access to out-of-scope secrets, so deployments that already set this parameter are not exploitable via this path. Exploitation is bounded to secrets within the same AWS account as the connector deployment; cross-account exfiltration is not described. The attacker must also operate or control a network-reachable endpoint that accepts ClickHouse protocol connection attempts from the connector Lambda's execution environment.

The CVSS 4.0 vector (AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:H) accurately characterizes this threat: low-complexity, network-accessible exploitation requiring only low-privilege authenticated AWS access, with high confidentiality impact on the vulnerable system. Even a mid-sized municipal IT team in rybnik using Amazon Athena for analytics workloads should treat this as urgent given that any AWS Secrets Manager secret in the deploying account - database passwords, API keys, third-party service tokens - is potentially at risk from a single exploitation event. EPSS data was not provided in the available intelligence, limiting probabilistic scoring. The absence of a CISA KEV listing and no referenced public POC code suggest widespread opportunistic exploitation is unlikely at the time of analysis; however, the targeted insider-threat or compromised-credential scenario is highly credible given the low attack complexity. The primary risk amplifier is the blast radius: successful exploitation can expose account-wide secrets rather than only connector-specific credentials. The primary limiting factor is that the attacker must hold IAM permissions sufficient to deploy or reconfigure an Athena connector via CloudFormation or SAM, which is not a default end-user entitlement but is commonly granted to data engineering and analytics roles.

An attacker holding a low-privilege AWS IAM identity with CloudFormation deployment permissions crafts connector parameters specifying a target Secrets Manager secret ARN belonging to an unrelated production service and sets the connection endpoint to an attacker-controlled server mimicking a ClickHouse instance. When the connector Lambda is invoked by an Athena query, it fetches the specified secret from Secrets Manager and transmits its value as connection credentials to the attacker's server, where it is logged. No public exploit code is referenced, but the attack requires only standard AWS CLI or console operations available to anyone with connector deployment rights.