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T1136.003 Cloud Account

Adversaries may create a cloud account to maintain access to victim systems. With a sufficient level of access, such accounts may be used to establish secondary credentialed access that does not require persistent remote access tools to be deployed on the system.19257

In addition to user accounts, cloud accounts may be associated with services. Cloud providers handle the concept of service accounts in different ways. In Azure, service accounts include service principals and managed identities, which can be linked to various resources such as OAuth applications, serverless functions, and virtual machines in order to grant those resources permissions to perform various activities in the environment.8 In GCP, service accounts can also be linked to specific resources, as well as be impersonated by other accounts for Temporary Elevated Cloud Access.6 While AWS has no specific concept of service accounts, resources can be directly granted permission to assume roles.43

Adversaries may create accounts that only have access to specific cloud services, which can reduce the chance of detection.

Once an adversary has created a cloud account, they can then manipulate that account to ensure persistence and allow access to additional resources - for example, by adding Additional Cloud Credentials or assigning Additional Cloud Roles.

Item Value
ID T1136.003
Sub-techniques T1136.001, T1136.002, T1136.003
Tactics TA0003
Platforms IaaS, Identity Provider, Office Suite, SaaS
Version 1.6
Created 29 January 2020
Last Modified 24 October 2025

Procedure Examples

ID Name Description
S0677 AADInternals AADInternals can create new Azure AD users.10
G0016 APT29 APT29 can create new users through Azure AD.11
G1004 LAPSUS$ LAPSUS$ has created global admin accounts in the targeted organization’s cloud instances to gain persistence.12

Mitigations

ID Mitigation Description
M1032 Multi-factor Authentication Use multi-factor authentication for user and privileged accounts.
M1030 Network Segmentation Configure access controls and firewalls to limit access to critical systems and domain controllers. Most cloud environments support separate virtual private cloud (VPC) instances that enable further segmentation of cloud systems.
M1026 Privileged Account Management Limit the number of accounts with permissions to create other accounts. Do not allow privileged accounts to be used for day-to-day operations that may expose them to potential adversaries on unprivileged systems.

References

  1. Ako-Adjei, K., Dickhaus, M., Baumgartner, P., Faigel, D., et. al.. (2019, October 8). About admin roles. Retrieved October 18, 2019. ↩

  2. AWS. (n.d.). Creating an IAM User in Your AWS Account. Retrieved January 29, 2020. ↩

  3. AWS. (n.d.). Lambda execution role. Retrieved February 28, 2024. ↩

  4. AWS. (n.d.). Using instance profiles. Retrieved February 28, 2024. ↩

  5. Google. (n.d.). Create Cloud Identity user accounts. Retrieved January 29, 2020. ↩

  6. Google. (n.d.). Service Accounts Overview. Retrieved February 28, 2024. ↩

  7. Microsoft. (2019, November 11). Add or delete users using Azure Active Directory. Retrieved January 30, 2020. ↩

  8. Microsoft. (2023, December 15). Application and service principal objects in Microsoft Entra ID. Retrieved February 28, 2024. ↩

  9. Microsoft. (n.d.). Add Another Admin. Retrieved October 18, 2019. ↩

  10. Dr. Nestori Syynimaa. (2018, October 25). AADInternals. Retrieved February 18, 2022. ↩

  11. Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center. (2021, October 25). NOBELIUM targeting delegated administrative privileges to facilitate broader attacks. Retrieved March 25, 2022. ↩

  12. MSTIC, DART, M365 Defender. (2022, March 24). DEV-0537 Criminal Actor Targeting Organizations for Data Exfiltration and Destruction. Retrieved May 17, 2022. ↩