Malicious GCP Service Account Backdoor via serviceAccountTokenCreator Grant

ATT&CK techniques

Persistence → Lateral Movement

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
- T1098.003Additional Cloud Roles
Priv Esc
- T1098.003Additional Cloud Roles
Defense Evasion
- T1550.001Application Access Token
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
- T1550.001Application Access Token
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects a google.iam.admin.v1.SetIAMPolicy admin activity event that grants the roles/iam.serviceAccountTokenCreator role, allowing a principal to mint access tokens for a targeted service account. Adversaries use this binding to backdoor a service account and later impersonate it through GenerateAccessToken, keeping durable privileged access. This matters because the grant converts any controlled identity into a lasting path to the service account privileges.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1098.003 — drag to rearrange

Suspicious GCP Service Account Impersonation via GenerateAccessToken

Suspicious Federated Identity Credential On-Behalf-Of Token Flow via Sign-In Logs

Suspicious Service Principal Creation via Azure Audit Logs

Suspicious Salesforce Bulk API Export via aiohttp User Agent

Malicious IAM Group Creation for SES Abuse by JavaGhost (via cloudtrail)

Malicious Administrator Policy Attachment for Privilege Escalation in AWS

Suspicious Azure Contributor Role Assignment to Identity

Suspicious Entra Sign-In With Axios Automation User-Agent via AiTM Token Replay (via azure)

Malicious Azure AD Token Abuse via Roadtx

Malicious GCP Service Account Backdoor via serviceAccountTokenCreator Grant

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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