Suspicious Service Principal Creation via Azure Audit Logs

ATT&CK techniques

Persistence → Priv Esc

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
- T1098.003Additional Cloud Roles
Priv Esc
- T1098.003Additional Cloud Roles
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects creation of a new service principal in Entra ID, an action attackers perform after illicit OAuth consent to register their own application identity for persistent tenant access. Newly added service principals with broad Graph scopes can read mail and files and move through cloud resources, making unexpected additions a meaningful signal of account or app abuse.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1098.003 — drag to rearrange

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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)

Suspicious Service Principal Creation via Azure Audit Logs

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.

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