---
title: "Investigating Unauthorized Access"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/investigating-unauthorized-access-2u5bldukk
source_url: https://www.huntress.com/blog/investigating-unauthorized-access-huntress-qa-environment-incident
type: article
source: "Huntress Blog"
published: 2026-05-31T07:43:35.694Z
updated: 2026-05-31T08:09:24.843Z
tags: ["security", "aws"]
reading_time: 10
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# Investigating Unauthorized Access

**[Huntress Blog](https://daily.dev/sources/huntress-blog)** · 10 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

Huntress publicly disclosed an unauthorized access incident in their QA environment where an attacker brute-forced an ephemeral Windows VM using weak credentials (Administrator/abc123!!!). No customer data, billing info, production systems, or source code was compromised due to proper network segmentation between QA and production AWS environments. The post details the full incident timeline, forensic investigation steps, remediation actions (switching to SSH key auth, disabling RDP, fixing VM orphaning bug, tightening CircleCI/AWS permissions), and guidance from their legal and cyber insurance teams. Huntress chose to disclose publicly despite no legal obligation, advocating for greater transparency and incident disclosure normalization across the industry.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://www.huntress.com/blog/investigating-unauthorized-access-huntress-qa-environment-incident>

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---

Tags: [#security](https://daily.dev/tags/security), [#aws](https://daily.dev/tags/aws)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/investigating-unauthorized-access-2u5bldukk)