Malicious Administrator Policy Attachment for Privilege Escalation in AWS

ATT&CK techniques

Persistence → Priv Esc

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
- T1098.003Additional Cloud Roles
Priv Esc
- T1098.003Additional Cloud Roles
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects the AdministratorAccess managed policy being attached to a role or user through AttachRolePolicy or AttachUserPolicy, a privilege escalation step in the large-scale cloud extortion operation that leveraged leaked environment variables. Granting full admin to a controlled identity gives the actor complete account control. Detecting this exposes escalation ahead of data theft and extortion.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1098.003 — drag to rearrange

Suspicious Azure Contributor Role Assignment to Identity

Malicious GCP Service Account Backdoor via serviceAccountTokenCreator Grant

Suspicious GCP Service Account Impersonation via GenerateAccessToken

Malicious Azure Elevate Access to User Access Administrator

Suspicious Azure Policy Definition or Assignment Modification

Suspicious AWS IAM Role Creation With Cross-Account Trust Policy

Suspicious MURKY PANDA Mail Permission Grant to Service Principal (via azure)

Malicious Assignment of a Privileged Azure AD Role (via auditlogs)

Suspicious Entra Cross-Tenant Access or External User Invitation via Azure Audit (via azure)

Malicious Administrator Policy Attachment for Privilege Escalation in AWS

Pivot detection · T1098.003 · 9 related

Detection content is published as a reviewed draft. Tune thresholds and exclusions against your own telemetry before enabling this rule for alerting.

Full detection rule

Unlock this rule to view and copy it

The detection logic is included with a plan. Everything else — context, mappings and implementation details — stays free on this page.

Sign in for 3 free unlocks

Signing in gives you 3 unlocks to spend on any rule in the library. No card, and they do not expire.

Also included

Unlocked rules convert on this page — to Splunk SPL or Splunk — Raw Index SPL or Microsoft Sentinel KQL or Microsoft Sentinel ASIM ASIM KQL or Microsoft Defender XDR KQL or Elastic Security KQL or Elastic Security Lucene or Elastic Security ES|QL or CrowdStrike Falcon CQL or SentinelOne PowerQuery or Palo Alto Cortex XDR XQL or Carbon Black Cloud Platform Search or Carbon Black EDR Process Search or Google Security Operations UDM Search or IBM QRadar AQL or Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM Rules expression or Rapid7 InsightIDR LEQL or Graylog Search or OpenSearch Lucene or OpenSearch PPL PPL or Grafana Loki LogQL or SQLite SQL or Zircolite SQLite — with the log-source profile the engine picked, the field map it used, and everything it could not express. Converting a rule you have unlocked costs no further credit.

See it run on a free rule →Convert your own rule →