Malicious Azure Elevate Access to User Access Administrator

ATT&CK techniques

Persistence → Defense Evasion

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
- T1098.003Additional Cloud Roles
Priv Esc
- T1098.003Additional Cloud Roles
- T1548Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism
Defense Evasion
- T1548Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects the Microsoft.Authorization/elevateAccess/action operation, which assigns the calling Global Administrator the User Access Administrator role across all Azure subscriptions in the tenant. Adversaries who compromise a Global Administrator use elevateAccess to break out of Entra ID into the Azure resource plane and take control of every subscription. This is important because it is a high-impact privilege escalation that exposes all cloud resources.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1098.003 — drag to rearrange

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

Malicious Update Orchestrator Service Reconfiguration for Privilege Escalation

Malicious macOS Credential Verification via dscl authonly

Malicious Azure Elevate Access to User Access Administrator

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.

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