Suspicious AWS STS AssumeRoot Privilege Escalation To Member Account Root

ATT&CK techniques

Initial Access → Defense Evasion

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
- T1078.004Cloud Accounts
Execution
Persistence
- T1078.004Cloud Accounts
Priv Esc
- T1078.004Cloud Accounts
- T1548.005Temporary Elevated Cloud Access
Defense Evasion
- T1078.004Cloud Accounts
- T1548.005Temporary Elevated Cloud Access
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects a CloudTrail STS AssumeRoot API call which grants short lived root credentials for a member account and is a powerful privilege escalation path in AWS organizations. Adversaries with a compromised IAM principal invoke AssumeRoot to obtain root level access over a member account and expand control.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1078.004 — drag to rearrange

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Suspicious AWS STS AssumeRoot Privilege Escalation To Member Account Root

Pivot detection · T1078.004 · 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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