Analytics Story: AWS IAM Privilege Escalation

Date: 2024-09-24 ID: ced74200-8465-4bc3-bd2c-22782eec6750 Author: Bhavin Patel, Splunk Product: Splunk Enterprise Security

Description

This analytic story contains detections that query your AWS Cloudtrail for activities related to privilege escalation.

Why it matters

Amazon Web Services provides a neat feature called Identity and Access Management (IAM) that enables organizations to manage various AWS services and resources in a secure way. All IAM users have roles, groups and policies associated with them which governs and sets permissions to allow a user to access specific restrictions. However, if these IAM policies are misconfigured and have specific combinations of weak permissions; it can allow attackers to escalate their privileges and further compromise the organization. Rhino Security Labs have published comprehensive blogs detailing various AWS Escalation methods. By using this as an inspiration, Splunks research team wants to highlight how these attack vectors look in AWS Cloudtrail logs and provide you with detection queries to uncover these potentially malicious events via this Analytic Story.

Detections

Name ▲▼	Technique ▲▼	Type ▲▼
ASL AWS IAM Delete Policy	Account Manipulation	Hunting
ASL AWS IAM Failure Group Deletion	Account Manipulation	Anomaly
ASL AWS IAM Successful Group Deletion	Cloud Groups, Account Manipulation, Permission Groups Discovery	Hunting
AWS Create Policy Version to allow all resources	Cloud Accounts, Valid Accounts	TTP
AWS CreateAccessKey	Cloud Account, Create Account	Hunting
AWS CreateLoginProfile	Cloud Account, Create Account	TTP
AWS IAM Assume Role Policy Brute Force	Cloud Infrastructure Discovery, Brute Force	TTP
AWS IAM Delete Policy	Account Manipulation	Hunting
AWS IAM Failure Group Deletion	Account Manipulation	Anomaly
AWS IAM Successful Group Deletion	Cloud Groups, Account Manipulation, Permission Groups Discovery	Hunting
AWS Password Policy Changes	Password Policy Discovery	Hunting
AWS SetDefaultPolicyVersion	Cloud Accounts, Valid Accounts	TTP
AWS UpdateLoginProfile	Cloud Account, Create Account	TTP
ASL AWS CreateAccessKey	Valid Accounts	Hunting
ASL AWS Password Policy Changes	Password Policy Discovery	Hunting

Data Sources

Name ▲▼	Platform ▲▼	Sourcetype ▲▼	Source ▲▼
AWS CloudTrail	AWS	`aws:cloudtrail`	`aws_cloudtrail`
AWS CloudTrail ConsoleLogin	AWS	`aws:cloudtrail`	`aws_cloudtrail`
AWS CloudTrail CreateAccessKey	AWS	`aws:cloudtrail`	`aws_cloudtrail`
AWS CloudTrail CreateLoginProfile	AWS	`aws:cloudtrail`	`aws_cloudtrail`
AWS CloudTrail CreatePolicyVersion	AWS	`aws:cloudtrail`	`aws_cloudtrail`
AWS CloudTrail DeleteAccountPasswordPolicy	AWS	`aws:cloudtrail`	`aws_cloudtrail`
AWS CloudTrail DeleteGroup	AWS	`aws:cloudtrail`	`aws_cloudtrail`
AWS CloudTrail DeletePolicy	AWS	`aws:cloudtrail`	`aws_cloudtrail`
AWS CloudTrail GetAccountPasswordPolicy	AWS	`aws:cloudtrail`	`aws_cloudtrail`
AWS CloudTrail SetDefaultPolicyVersion	AWS	`aws:cloudtrail`	`aws_cloudtrail`
AWS CloudTrail UpdateAccountPasswordPolicy	AWS	`aws:cloudtrail`	`aws_cloudtrail`
AWS CloudTrail UpdateLoginProfile	AWS	`aws:cloudtrail`	`aws_cloudtrail`

References

Source: GitHub | Version: 2