Suspicious High-Privilege Microsoft Graph Application Role Grant via Azure Audit (via azure)

ATT&CK techniques

Persistence → Lateral Movement

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
- T1098.003Additional Cloud Roles
Priv Esc
- T1098.003Additional Cloud Roles
Defense Evasion
- T1550Use Alternate Authentication Material
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
- T1550Use Alternate Authentication Material
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects the assignment of high-privilege Microsoft Graph application roles such as AppRoleAssignment.ReadWrite.All, Directory.ReadWrite.All, or RoleManagement.ReadWrite.Directory to a service principal, an escalation path into Azure highlighted by Red Canary. Granting these permissions lets an app rewrite directory roles and grant itself further access, making it a powerful and stealthy persistence mechanism that should be tightly controlled.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1098.003 — drag to rearrange

Malicious Assignment of a Privileged Azure AD Role (via auditlogs)

Suspicious Entra Cross-Tenant Access or External User Invitation via Azure Audit (via azure)

Suspicious Delegated Permission Grant to Entra Agent Access Scope via Azure Audit Logs

Suspicious IAM CreateLoginProfile For Root User via AWS AssumeRoot Abuse

Suspicious AWS IAM Privilege Escalation via AttachUserPolicy of Administrator Policy

Suspicious Member Added to Privileged Directory Role in Entra ID

GCP Google Workspace: Application ContextAwareAccess Setting Changed

GitHub Audit: Outside Collaborator Membership and Permission Changes

Azure Audit Logs: Admin-initiated App Role Assignments and Privileged Delegated Permissions

Suspicious High-Privilege Microsoft Graph Application Role Grant via Azure Audit (via azure)

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.

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 →