Suspicious IAM Policy Attachment Granting AdministratorAccess

ATT&CK techniques

Persistence → Priv Esc

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

What it detects

This rule detects an AttachUserPolicy call that attaches the AWS managed AdministratorAccess policy to an IAM user. After compromising an EC2 instance and stealing IMDS credentials the attacker created a rogue IAM user and granted it full administrator rights for persistence and privilege escalation. Sudden attachment of AdministratorAccess to a user is high-signal for cloud account takeover.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1098.001 — drag to rearrange

Suspicious IAM Access Key Creation for Persistence (via cloudtrail)

Suspicious AWS Administrator Policy Attachment via CloudTrail (via aws)

Suspicious AWS Inline Policy Granting Full S3 Access

Suspicious GCP Service Account Key Creation for Persistence (via gcp.audit)

Malicious Credential Added to an Azure AD Application (via auditlogs)

Suspicious AWS Long-Term Access Key Creation for Persistence via CloudTrail (via aws)

Suspicious Credential Added to Existing Application for OAuth Persistence in Entra ID (via azure auditlogs)

Suspicious Credential Added to Application or Service Principal in Entra ID (via azure)

Okta System Log: New Identity Provider Created via system.idp.lifecycle.create

Suspicious IAM Policy Attachment Granting AdministratorAccess

Pivot detection · T1098.001 · 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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