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 Cross-Project Compute Snapshot Creation via GCP Audit

Suspicious EBS Snapshot Shared With External Account via CloudTrail

Suspicious Container Image Export via ctr in Cloud Model Exfiltration

Suspicious AWS Transfer Family Server Creation for Data Exfiltration (via cloudtrail)

Suspicious EC2 Snapshot Attribute Modification for External Sharing via CloudTrail

Possible Azure Storage Ransomware via Customer-Managed Key Encryption

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

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.

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