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

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Suspicious AiTM Session Cookie Exfiltration to log_cookie Endpoint

Possible SES Sending Configuration Enumeration via CloudTrail

Suspicious AWS Role Assumption via Cognito Web Identity

Suspicious MURKY PANDA Credential Addition to Entra ID Service Principal (via azure)

Suspicious Google Cloud Function Create or Update Triggering Build

Suspicious IAM Access Key Creation for Persistence (via cloudtrail)

Possible Credential Stuffing Blocked by Conditional Access in Microsoft 365

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.

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