Suspicious MURKY PANDA Mail Permission Grant to 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 an application role assignment being granted to a service principal in Microsoft Entra ID. MURKY PANDA assigned Microsoft Graph mail permissions to compromised service principals to read victim mailboxes over a trusted application identity. Newly granted high-privilege app roles warrant review.

Related detections9 linkedT1098.003 — drag to rearrange
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Malicious Administrator Policy Attachment for Privilege Escalation in AWS
Suspicious Azure Contributor Role Assignment to Identity
Malicious GCP Service Account Backdoor via serviceAccountTokenCreator Grant
Suspicious GCP Service Account Impersonation via GenerateAccessToken
Malicious Azure Elevate Access to User Access Administrator
Suspicious Azure Policy Definition or Assignment Modification
Suspicious AWS IAM Role Creation With Cross-Account Trust Policy
Suspicious MURKY PANDA Mail Permission Grant to Service Principal (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.