Suspicious Azure Cognitive Services Account Key Enumeration via ListKeys (via azure)

PremiumReviewedSigma · Medium · v1
Product
azure
Service
activitylogs
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-10-23
Updated
2026-10-23

ATT&CK techniques

Initial Access → Defense Evasion
  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Execution

  4. Cred Access

  5. Discovery

  6. Lateral Movement

  7. Collection

  8. C2

  9. Exfiltration

  10. Impact

What it detects

This rule detects the Cognitive Services ListKeys action in Azure activity logs, the API-key retrieval step Red Canary observed adversaries using to obtain persistent Azure OpenAI credentials. Because the returned key does not expire unless regenerated, unexpected ListKeys calls against a Cognitive Services account can indicate an actor acquiring durable access for later model abuse.

Related detections9 linkedT1078.004 — drag to rearrange
Suspicious Azure OpenAI Model Enumeration and Deployment Creation (via azure)
Malicious Business Email Compromise OAuth Application Sign-In via Entra ID Service Principal (via azure)
Suspicious AWS API Call from TruffleHog Credential Scanner User Agent
Suspicious Compute Instance Metadata Modification in GCP
Malicious JavaGhost Security Group Creation (via cloudtrail)
Suspicious S3 Access from Desktop File Transfer Clients by Bling Libra
Suspicious SSH Key Push to EC2 via EC2 Instance Connect
Suspicious EC2 Key Pair Import via aws (via cloudtrail)
Suspicious M365 Sign-In With axios Automation User-Agent (via azure)
Suspicious Azure Cognitive Services Account Key Enumeration via ListKeys (via azure)
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.