Suspicious AWS IAM Role Creation With Cross-Account Trust Policy

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 an IAM CreateRole event whose assumeRolePolicyDocument establishes a trust relationship that allows another AWS account principal to assume the role. Adversaries create such backdoored roles so an attacker-controlled external account gains persistent access into the victim environment. This is important because cross-account trust relationships are a stealthy persistence mechanism that survives credential rotation.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1098.003 — drag to rearrange

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Suspicious AWS IAM Privilege Escalation via AttachUserPolicy of Administrator Policy

Suspicious Member Added to Privileged Directory Role in Entra ID

Suspicious High-Privilege Microsoft Graph Application Role Grant via Azure Audit (via azure)

Suspicious AWS IAM Role Creation With Cross-Account Trust Policy

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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