AWS credentials are the sensitive keys, tokens, and session values used to authenticate to Amazon Web Services. They may include access keys, secret access keys, and temporary tokens issued by IAM or federation systems. Because these values act like a login, anyone who obtains them can often act as that identity in the cloud, sometimes with the same privileges as the original user or application.
In real attacks, credentials are commonly harvested from exposed environment files, developer machines, build logs, or misconfigured services that reveal local files. Once stolen, they can be used to list resources, read data, create new access paths, or move deeper into an environment. Defenders reduce risk by storing secrets in dedicated secret managers, limiting permissions, rotating keys regularly, and keeping development tools bound to localhost unless public access is truly required.