Suspicious IAM Persistence and Privilege Escalation Actions

ATT&CK techniques

Initial Access → Defense Evasion

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
- T1078.004Cloud Accounts
Execution
Persistence
- T1078.004Cloud Accounts
- T1098.001Additional Cloud Credentials
Priv Esc
- T1078.004Cloud Accounts
- T1098.001Additional Cloud Credentials
Defense Evasion
- T1078.004Cloud Accounts
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects AWS IAM API calls commonly chained for persistence and privilege escalation, such as creating access keys, attaching policies, updating assume-role trust policies, or passing a role. Elastic highlights these actions as high-value signals when performed by unexpected principals during account compromise.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1078.004 — drag to rearrange

Malicious AWS Cross-Account AssumeRole With Suspicious Session Names via CloudTrail (via aws)

Suspicious Okta SSO Access to Many Applications in Short Window

Suspicious Microsoft Entra Device Code Authentication Flow

Suspicious M365 Password Spraying via Azure PowerShell AppId from Quad7 Botnet

Suspicious AWS Instance Access or Export via SSH Key or Export Task

Suspicious Credential Addition to Entra Application via Azure Audit Logs

Suspicious Azure OpenAI Model Enumeration and Deployment Creation (via azure)

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

Malicious Business Email Compromise OAuth Application Sign-In via Entra ID Service Principal (via azure)

Suspicious IAM Persistence and Privilege Escalation Actions

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.

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 →