In a red team exercise against a company's cloud infrastructure, you discover that the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances are configured to allow any attached role to access the instance metadata service without restrictions. With this misconfiguration in mind, what sophisticated technique should be used to carry out an attack that leverages the instance metadata service to gain escalated privileges within the cloud environment?
Use NTLM relay attacks to capture authentication details and replay them against the metadata service for escalated cloud privileges.
Perform a VLAN hopping attack to bypass network segmentation and access the metadata service from a compromised instance within the same VLAN.
Engage in Kerberoasting to steal Kerberos tickets from the EC2 instances and gain access to the metadata service.
Execute a Direct-to-Origin attack by accessing the instance metadata service directly to retrieve security credentials for IAM role escalation.
A Direct-to-Origin attack is a sophisticated technique that requires bypassing external defenses to directly interact with the cloud services, such as the metadata service. In this context, the attack could be performed by interacting directly with the EC2 instance's metadata service, typically over HTTP on a specific IP address. By requesting security credentials for an IAM role that's associated with the EC2 instance, an attacker can potentially leverage these credentials for AWS API calls, which may lead to privilege escalation if the role has extensive permissions.
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