Attackers Abuse Qubole Cloud Trust Links to Reach Multiple Customer AWS Environments

Wiz Research, working with Sentra and Mandiant, has reported a supply chain attack in which a threat actor used IAM credentials from an AWS account associated with Qubole between October 14 and October 26, 2026. The actor used them to assume IAM roles that customers had created to trust Qubole's account. Sentra spotted suspicious activity across several of its customers, recognised it as a broad supply chain attack and shared the details with Wiz.

Many software-as-a-service platforms that work inside a customer's AWS account rely on this kind of cross-account role. During onboarding, the customer creates a role in their own account that allows the vendor's account to assume it, usually protected by an External ID. When the vendor needs to act, it requests temporary credentials scoped to that role. Here, the trust that customers granted to the vendor was the path the attacker used.

Once inside multiple victim environments, the actor listed resources, collected configuration data and secrets, accessed S3 storage data, and tested additional credentials it found along the way. The first activity Wiz observed was on October 14, when an IP address belonging to Mullvad VPN requested role access from the Qubole-associated account using an IAM user that Wiz has not seen used for anything else. The Wiz post goes on to cover how defenders can hunt for this activity and reduce exposure from third-party trust relationships; this summary draws only on the opening of that article.