T1098.003 Additional Cloud Roles
An adversary may add additional roles or permissions to an adversary-controlled cloud account to maintain persistent access to a tenant. For example, adversaries may update IAM policies in cloud-based environments or add a new global administrator in Office 365 environments.4562 With sufficient permissions, a compromised account can gain almost unlimited access to data and settings (including the ability to reset the passwords of other admins).1 2
This account modification may immediately follow Create Account or other malicious account activity. Adversaries may also modify existing Valid Accounts that they have compromised. This could lead to privilege escalation, particularly if the roles added allow for lateral movement to additional accounts.
For example, in Azure AD environments, an adversary with the Application Administrator role can add Additional Cloud Credentials to their application’s service principal. In doing so the adversary would be able to gain the service principal’s roles and permissions, which may be different from those of the Application Administrator.3 Similarly, in AWS environments, an adversary with appropriate permissions may be able to use the CreatePolicyVersion
API to define a new version of an IAM policy or the AttachUserPolicy
API to attach an IAM policy with additional or distinct permissions to a compromised user account.8
Similarly, an adversary with the Azure AD Global Administrator role can toggle the “Access management for Azure resources” option to gain the ability to assign privileged access to Azure subscriptions and virtual machines to Azure AD users, including themselves.7
Item | Value |
---|---|
ID | T1098.003 |
Sub-techniques | T1098.001, T1098.002, T1098.003, T1098.004, T1098.005 |
Tactics | TA0003 |
Platforms | Azure AD, Google Workspace, IaaS, Office 365, SaaS |
Version | 2.2 |
Created | 19 January 2020 |
Last Modified | 14 April 2023 |
Procedure Examples
ID | Name | Description |
---|---|---|
G1004 | LAPSUS$ | LAPSUS$ has added the global admin role to accounts they have created in the targeted organization’s cloud instances.10 |
C0024 | SolarWinds Compromise | During the SolarWinds Compromise, APT29 granted company administrator privileges to a newly created service principle.11 |
Mitigations
ID | Mitigation | Description |
---|---|---|
M1032 | Multi-factor Authentication | Use multi-factor authentication for user and privileged accounts. |
M1026 | Privileged Account Management | Ensure that all accounts use the least privileges they require. In Azure AD environments, consider using Privileged Identity Management (PIM) to define roles that require two or more approvals before assignment to users.9 |
M1018 | User Account Management | Ensure that low-privileged user accounts do not have permissions to add permissions to accounts or update IAM policies. |
Detection
ID | Data Source | Data Component |
---|---|---|
DS0002 | User Account | User Account Modification |
References
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Brian Bahtiarian, David Blanton, Britton Manahan and Kyle Pellett. (2022, April 5). Incident report: From CLI to console, chasing an attacker in AWS. Retrieved April 7, 2022. ↩
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Ako-Adjei, K., Dickhaus, M., Baumgartner, P., Faigel, D., et. al.. (2019, October 8). About admin roles. Retrieved October 18, 2019. ↩↩
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Andy Robbins. (2021, October 12). Azure Privilege Escalation via Service Principal Abuse. Retrieved April 1, 2022. ↩
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AWS. (n.d.). Policies and permissions in IAM. Retrieved April 1, 2022. ↩
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Google Cloud. (2022, March 31). Understanding policies. Retrieved April 1, 2022. ↩
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Microsoft. (n.d.). Add Another Admin. Retrieved October 18, 2019. ↩
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Sean Metcalf. (2020, May 27). From Azure AD to Active Directory (via Azure) – An Unanticipated Attack Path. Retrieved September 28, 2022. ↩
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Spencer Gietzen. (n.d.). AWS IAM Privilege Escalation – Methods and Mitigation. Retrieved May 27, 2022. ↩
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Microsoft. (2023, January 30). Approve or deny requests for Azure AD roles in Privileged Identity Management. Retrieved February 21, 2023. ↩
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MSTIC, DART, M365 Defender. (2022, March 24). DEV-0537 Criminal Actor Targeting Organizations for Data Exfiltration and Destruction. Retrieved May 17, 2022. ↩
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CrowdStrike. (2022, January 27). Early Bird Catches the Wormhole: Observations from the StellarParticle Campaign. Retrieved February 7, 2022. ↩