🔒 Security & Privacy

Capital One's SSRF Nightmare: How One Bad URL Stole 100 Million Lives

Picture this: a hacker types a URL. Your server fetches it blindly. Boom—100 million credit apps, SSNs, gone. Capital One's SSRF screw-up wasn't rocket science; it was basic trust gone wrong.

Open Source Beat Apr 12, 2026 4 min read
Visual chain of Capital One SSRF attack from URL input to 100M records exfiltrated

⚡ Key Takeaways

  • SSRF via unvalidated URLs directly harvested AWS IAM creds from IMDSv1—no malware needed. 𝕏
  • IMDSv2 + URL allowlisting stops this cold; most breaches skip these basics. 𝕏
  • Cloud vendors profit from fixes—your breach is their business model. 𝕏
Written by

Priya Sundaram

Hardware and infrastructure reporter. Tracks GPU wars, chip design, and the compute economy.

#AWS IMDSv1 #Capital One breach #SSRF attack #cloud-security #credential theft

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Originally reported by Dev.to

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