September 14, 2026 By Bill Toulas
A mass-scanning campaign targeting internet-exposed Vite development servers is attempting to steal cloud credentials and configurations from AWS and Azure deployments.
The operation leverages an exploit for CVE-2026-39364, a high-severity vulnerability that allows bypassing file read/access controls in Vite versions 7.1.0 through 7.3.2, as well as the 8.x branch before 8.0.5.
The flaw was disclosed on April 7 and allows an unauthenticated attacker to manipulate query parameters in an HTTP GET request to bypass security restrictions and retrieve files in plaintext from locations that should normally be out of their reach.
Technology company F5 detected the attacks through its honeypot sensors, observing more than 800 attacks and approximately 32,000 raw events over a month.
“When specific parameters such as ?raw, ?import&raw, or ?import&url&inline are appended to a request, the server fails to enforce deny-list filtering and serves the target file with an HTTP 200 response,” F5 explains.
After breaching a system, the scanning focused on valuable secrets by using extensive wordlists for the following types of data:
- .env, .env.production, .env.local, and other environment files
- AWS credential files from several possible home directories
- AWS configuration files and credential backups
- Azure credentials and access tokens
- Terraform state and variable files
- Serverless configuration/state
- /proc/self/environ, /proc/1/environ, and /proc/self/cwd/.env
- /etc/passwd
F5 notes that the operation also tried traversal and encoding variants, including double-encoded traversal sequences, apparently to get past reverse proxies or WAF normalization.
Most of the observed malicious activity originated from the United States, Belgium, and the Netherlands, with the attackers using Google Cloud IP ranges for evasion.
The most active IP addresses also leveraged other access control flaws in Vite: CVE-2025-30208, CVE-2025-31125 (flagged as actively exploited), and CVE-2024-45811.