Suspicious Compute Disk IAM Policy Modification Granting Owner Role via GCP Audit

ATT&CK techniques

Defense Evasion → Exfiltration

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
- T1578.001Create Snapshot
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
- T1537Transfer Data to Cloud Account
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects v1.compute.disks.setIamPolicy operations that modify the IAM policy on a Compute Engine disk. Adversaries bind privileged roles such as roles/owner to an external principal to share a disk out of the victim project for data exfiltration. Granting broad access to a disk resource enables theft of the data stored on it without directly reading the volume.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1537 — drag to rearrange

Suspicious EBS Snapshot Shared With External Account via CloudTrail

Suspicious GCP Bucket Deletion for Namespace Hijacking (via gcp)

Suspicious Azure CLI Disk Snapshot and Copy for Data Theft

GitHub Audit Log: Repository or Organization Transfer Detected

GitHub Audit Logs: Private/Internal Forking Policy Enabled or Cleared

Microsoft 365 SecurityComplianceCenter: Exfiltration Activity to Unsanctioned Apps

AWS CloudTrail S3 Bucket/Replication Configuration Tampering via Management API Calls

AWS CloudTrail: EC2 Snapshot Attribute Permission Modified for Cross-Account Access

AWS CloudTrail EC2 CreateInstanceExportTask Failure

Suspicious Compute Disk IAM Policy Modification Granting Owner Role via GCP Audit

Pivot detection · T1537 · 9 related

Detection content is published as a reviewed draft. Tune thresholds and exclusions against your own telemetry before enabling this rule for alerting.

Full detection rule

Unlock this rule to view and copy it

The detection logic is included with a plan. Everything else — context, mappings and implementation details — stays free on this page.

Sign in for 3 free unlocks

Signing in gives you 3 unlocks to spend on any rule in the library. No card, and they do not expire.

Also included

Unlocked rules convert on this page — to Splunk SPL or Splunk — Raw Index SPL or Microsoft Sentinel KQL or Microsoft Sentinel ASIM ASIM KQL or Microsoft Defender XDR KQL or Elastic Security KQL or Elastic Security Lucene or Elastic Security ES|QL or CrowdStrike Falcon CQL or SentinelOne PowerQuery or Palo Alto Cortex XDR XQL or Carbon Black Cloud Platform Search or Carbon Black EDR Process Search or Google Security Operations UDM Search or IBM QRadar AQL or Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM Rules expression or Rapid7 InsightIDR LEQL or Graylog Search or OpenSearch Lucene or OpenSearch PPL PPL or Grafana Loki LogQL or SQLite SQL or Zircolite SQLite — with the log-source profile the engine picked, the field map it used, and everything it could not express. Converting a rule you have unlocked costs no further credit.

See it run on a free rule →Convert your own rule →