IMDS Abused: Hunting Rare Behaviors to Uncover Exploits

This blog post describes how attackers increasingly abuse the cloud Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) to steal credentials, move laterally, and escalate privileges. It explains that IMDS allows cloud instances to retrieve temporary credentials securely, but weaker versions (IMDSv1) are vulnerable to Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) attacks, so enforcing IMDSv2 is important. The authors present a data-driven threat-hunting methodology: establish a baseline of normal IMDS usage, detect processes that rarely but unusually access IMDS, focus on sensitive metadata paths, and use contextual signals to prioritize threats. Using this approach, they uncovered a zero-day SSRF vulnerability in Pandoc (CVE-2025-51591), exploited via embedded iframes pointing to IMDS, and another SSRF abuse in ClickHouse via vulnerable URL functions. They emphasize proactive prevention and real-time detection: enforcing IMDSv2, least privilege roles, and continuously monitoring anomalous IMDS behavior, as embodied in the Wiz platform and threat intelligence. 

https://www.wiz.io/blog/imds-anomaly-hunting-zero-day

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