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

PremiumReviewedSigma · Medium · v1
Product
azure
Service
auditlogs
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-09-12
Updated
2026-09-12

ATT&CK techniques

Persistence → Priv Esc
  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Initial Access

  4. Execution

  5. Defense Evasion

  6. Cred Access

  7. Discovery

  8. Lateral Movement

  9. Collection

  10. C2

  11. Exfiltration

  12. Impact

What it detects

This rule detects credentials being added to an existing Microsoft Entra ID service principal. MURKY PANDA injected new secrets into legitimate service principals to establish stealthy cross-tenant cloud persistence. Unexpected credential additions to application identities can indicate abuse of trusted relationships.

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 IAM Policy Attachment Granting AdministratorAccess
Suspicious Credential Added to Application or Service Principal in Entra ID (via azure)
Suspicious MURKY PANDA Credential Addition to Entra ID Service Principal (via azure)
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.