Hackers Are Actively Scanning AWS Public IP Ranges — And Your Infrastructure Might Be the Next Target

 

If you’ve ever spun up an EC2 instance in AWS — even for five minutes — you’ve been scanned by a hacker. Probably within seconds.

You didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t leave a port wide open. You didn’t even publicize the IP address. But they still found you.

Because you were born into the wrong neighborhood — and AWS public IP space is a very bad neighborhood.

Hackers Are Scanning Amazon’s Entire IP Range?

Yes, constantly and systematically. Every IP address Amazon owns — and that’s millions — is fair game to them. They cycle through AWS IP blocks 24/7, scanning for:

• Open SSH ports (:22)
• Misconfigured databases
• Forgotten APIs
• Jenkins dashboards
• S3 buckets with directory listings
• Metadata endpoints

These aren’t humans doing recon. These are fully automated botnets running on other cloud providers (even AWS itself sometimes — ironic, right?).

It’s like walking through a sketchy alley with your phone’s flashlight on. Even if you don’t say anything , you’re still visible.

“Why Would They Scan My IP? I’m Just Testing Something…”

Public IP + cloud provider + open port = target.

These bots don’t care who you are. They don’t know if it’s a dev box, a prod server, or a dormant side project. They just scan, index, and report:

• What services are running?
• What ports are open?
• What headers are exposed
• What software versions are you running?
• Whether your SSL cert is expired
• And more, in milliseconds

Then this info gets dumped into hacker forums, Telegram channels, or sold on shady marketplaces. Sometimes, your EC2 won’t be attacked immediately. But it’s been tagged. And now you’re on a watchlist.

How the Automation Works

They use tools like

• Masscan (10M packets/sec scanner)
• Nmap with scripting engines
• Shodan-like crawlers with cloud focus
• Custom Go/Rust bots optimized for EC2 footprints

They grab the entire published AWS IP ranges (yes, Amazon publishes this).

https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json

That’s not a secret. It’s public. And updated daily. From there, they write scripts like

for ip in $(aws_ips); do
masscan $ip -p22,80,443,3306,27017 - rate 10000

Once they get a hit, they run version sniffers or attempt known exploits.

Real-World Incident: Dev Test Turned Disaster

A junior dev at a health company spun up an EC2 for staging. They opened port 22 for SSH but didn’t enable key authentication. They used a password login (rookie mistake). No fail2ban. No firewall.

It took 6 minutes for the first brute-force attempt. It took 12 hours for a successful login. It took 2 days before the EC2 was mining crypto and exfiltrating data.

No alerts. No CloudTrail setup. Just an unexpected $1,300 AWS bill and a very awkward meeting.

Why You’re an Easy Target (Even If You Think You’re Secure)

Let’s be honest — most AWS accounts:

• Don’t have GuardDuty turned on.
• Don’t configure proper VPC flow logs.
• Don’t use security groups like they should.
• Don’t rotate keys or use IAM roles properly.
• Don’t run patch updates on EC2.
• Don’t terminate unused boxes.
• Don’t set up basic detection like AWS Config alerts.

In other words:

You think your stuff is “not discoverable.” But to a hacker’s scanner, it’s glowing red.

How to Vanish From the AWS Hit List (Without Quitting the Cloud)

Here’s how to disappear from the default hacker radar:

1. Never Use a Public IP Unless You Have To

• Use private subnets in your VPC.
• Route traffic through a NAT Gateway or a Load Balancer.
• Assign Elastic IPs only when necessary , and remove them when not.

2. Lock Down Security Groups

• Never allow 0.0.0.0/0 for any sensitive port (especially SSH).
• Use whitelisted IPs, or better yet, bastion hosts.
• Enable connection logging via VPC flow logs.

3. Use AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Instead of SSH

• No need to open port 22.
• Connect to instances securely through IAM + SSM Agent
• Full session logging + audit trails

4. Enable GuardDuty

• Detects port scans, credential anomalies, and unusual regions
• You’ll get real alerts instead of discovering the breach post-mortem.

5. Use Fail2Ban + Key-Based SSH (If You Must Use SSH)

• Install Fail2Ban to block brute-force attempts.Disable password auth completely.
• Rotate keys every 30–90 days.