Ticket summary
Overnight on 19 August 2026 the HarborLine Retail Group cloud security monitoring team detected unusual S3 activity involving a production data bucket. An IAM identity that normally performs a narrow set of application-related operations suddenly generated a large number of S3 object requests from an unfamiliar source, and outbound data transfer associated with the bucket rose well above its usual level. You are the SOC analyst assigned to the ticket.
HarborLine Retail Group runs its retail data platform in AWS account 851725491209 (ap-south-1). Several production S3 buckets hold application assets, analytics datasets, finance reports, database backups, and customer records. A handful of IAM service accounts and named users read from those buckets on a routine basis, and the platform team considers the current traffic profile well understood.
During the early hours of 19 August the monitoring stack raised findings describing anomalous S3 behaviour. The evidence package attached to this ticket contains CloudTrail management and S3 data events for the full window, the S3 bucket inventory, the object inventory with sizes and metadata, per-bucket request and transfer metrics, and identity metadata for the principal named in the findings.
Determine whether sensitive data was actually exfiltrated. Identify which bucket was targeted, which identity was responsible, where the requests came from, which objects were reached, how much data left the bucket, and over what period. Be careful: this account has legitimate high-volume S3 traffic during the same window, so transfer volume on its own does not prove anything. Then recommend containment and remediation.