Suspicious RDS Snapshot Shared to External AWS Account for Exfiltration (via cloudtrail)

PremiumReviewedSigma · Medium · v1
Product
aws
Service
cloudtrail
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-10-31
Updated
2026-10-31

ATT&CK techniques

Exfiltration
  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Initial Access

  4. Execution

  5. Persistence

  6. Priv Esc

  7. Defense Evasion

  8. Cred Access

  9. Discovery

  10. Lateral Movement

  11. Collection

  12. C2

  13. Impact

What it detects

This rule detects an RDS ModifyDBSnapshotAttribute or ModifyDBClusterSnapshotAttribute call altering the restore attribute to share a database snapshot, the exfiltration method attackers use to copy victim data into an account they control. Sharing snapshots externally moves entire databases out of band without touching the running instance. Detecting restore-attribute changes on RDS snapshots surfaces cloud data theft.

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Suspicious AWS Transfer Family Server Creation for Data Exfiltration (via cloudtrail)
Suspicious EC2 Snapshot Attribute Modification for External Sharing via CloudTrail
Suspicious Cross-Project Compute Snapshot Creation via GCP Audit
Suspicious Compute Disk IAM Policy Modification Granting Owner Role via GCP Audit
Suspicious EBS Snapshot Shared With External Account via CloudTrail
Suspicious RDS Snapshot Shared to External AWS Account for Exfiltration (via cloudtrail)
Pivot detection · T1537 · 9 related

Detection content is published as a reviewed draft. Tune thresholds and exclusions against your own telemetry before enabling this rule for alerting.