This threat centers on the widespread practice of deploying intentionally vulnerable training and demo applications—such as OWASP Juice Shop, DVWA, Hackazon, and bWAPP—in real-world cloud environments without adequate security controls. These applications are designed to be insecure for educational purposes but become dangerous when exposed publicly and connected to active cloud identities with excessive privileges. Pentera Labs' research uncovered nearly 2,000 live instances of such exposed training applications, with approximately 60% hosted on major cloud platforms including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. The core issue is the lack of proper isolation and overly permissive cloud role assignments, which allow attackers to leverage these vulnerable applications as initial footholds. Once inside, attackers can exploit connected privileged identities to move laterally and escalate privileges within the cloud environment, compromising broader infrastructure beyond the training app itself. Evidence of active exploitation includes the deployment of crypto-mining malware, webshells, and persistence tools in about 20% of exposed instances, demonstrating that attackers are actively abusing these misconfigurations at scale. The affected environments include those belonging to Fortune 500 companies and leading cybersecurity vendors, highlighting the widespread nature of this risk. The threat does not rely on zero-day vulnerabilities but rather on poor operational security practices such as leaving default credentials, known vulnerabilities, and public exposure unaddressed. The research emphasizes that labeling an environment as 'training' or 'test' does not mitigate risk if it remains connected to privileged cloud resources and accessible from the internet. This situation calls for improved lifecycle management, continuous monitoring, and strict access controls to prevent attackers from exploiting these training applications as gateways into critical cloud infrastructure.

For European organizations, the impact of this threat can be severe due to the increasing reliance on cloud infrastructures and the widespread use of security training tools in corporate environments. Exposure of training applications connected to privileged cloud identities can lead to unauthorized access to sensitive data, disruption of cloud services, and significant financial losses due to crypto-mining resource abuse and potential lateral movement by attackers. The compromise of cloud environments can also damage organizational reputation and lead to regulatory penalties under GDPR if personal data is accessed or exfiltrated. Additionally, the persistence of attackers within cloud environments can facilitate further attacks, including ransomware or espionage. Given that many European enterprises operate in highly regulated sectors such as finance, healthcare, and critical infrastructure, the risk of cascading effects from such breaches is substantial. The threat also complicates incident response and forensic investigations due to the blending of training/test environments with production cloud resources. Overall, this vulnerability undermines cloud security postures and increases the attack surface, making it a critical concern for European organizations aiming to maintain robust cybersecurity defenses.

1. Enforce strict network segmentation to isolate training and demo environments from production cloud resources and the public internet. 2. Remove or decommission training applications immediately after their intended use or deploy them in fully isolated, ephemeral environments with no connection to privileged cloud identities. 3. Implement least privilege principles by auditing and restricting cloud roles and permissions associated with training environments, ensuring they do not have access to sensitive resources. 4. Continuously monitor cloud environments for exposed training applications, unusual activity such as crypto-mining, and unauthorized persistence mechanisms using cloud-native security tools and third-party solutions. 5. Integrate training environment management into standard security lifecycle processes, including regular access reviews, patching, and vulnerability assessments. 6. Employ multi-factor authentication and strong credential management to prevent exploitation via default or weak credentials. 7. Use automated discovery tools to identify and inventory all training/demo applications deployed across cloud accounts to prevent shadow IT risks. 8. Educate cloud administrators and developers on the risks of exposing intentionally vulnerable applications and enforce policies that prohibit their deployment in production or publicly accessible environments. 9. Leverage cloud provider security features such as private endpoints, virtual private clouds (VPCs), and identity and access management (IAM) policies to minimize exposure. 10. Conduct regular penetration testing and red team exercises focusing on training environments to identify and remediate misconfigurations before attackers can exploit them.