Suspicious Azure Policy Definition or Assignment Modification

PremiumReviewedSigma · Medium · v1
Product
azure
Service
activitylogs
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-09-14
Updated
2026-09-14

ATT&CK techniques

Persistence → Priv Esc
  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Initial Access

  4. Execution

  5. Defense Evasion

  6. Cred Access

  7. Discovery

  8. Lateral Movement

  9. Collection

  10. C2

  11. Exfiltration

  12. Impact

What it detects

This rule detects Azure Activity Log write operations against policy set definitions or policy assignments which an identity holding the Resource Policy Contributor role can abuse to modify a shared policy and inherit elevated service principal permissions across all its assignments for privilege escalation.

Related detections9 linkedT1098.003 — drag to rearrange
Suspicious Service Principal Creation via Azure Audit Logs
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
Malicious GCP Service Account Backdoor via serviceAccountTokenCreator Grant
Suspicious GCP Service Account Impersonation via GenerateAccessToken
Malicious Azure Elevate Access to User Access Administrator
Suspicious AWS IAM Role Creation With Cross-Account Trust Policy
Suspicious MURKY PANDA Mail Permission Grant to Service Principal (via azure)
Suspicious Azure Policy Definition or Assignment Modification
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.