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T1580 Cloud Infrastructure Discovery

An adversary may attempt to discover infrastructure and resources that are available within an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environment. This includes compute service resources such as instances, virtual machines, and snapshots as well as resources of other services including the storage and database services.

Cloud providers offer methods such as APIs and commands issued through CLIs to serve information about infrastructure. For example, AWS provides a DescribeInstances API within the Amazon EC2 API that can return information about one or more instances within an account, the ListBuckets API that returns a list of all buckets owned by the authenticated sender of the request, the HeadBucket API to determine a bucket’s existence along with access permissions of the request sender, or the GetPublicAccessBlock API to retrieve access block configuration for a bucket.5632 Similarly, GCP’s Cloud SDK CLI provides the gcloud compute instances list command to list all Google Compute Engine instances in a project 7, and Azure’s CLI command az vm list lists details of virtual machines.9 In addition to API commands, adversaries can utilize open source tools to discover cloud storage infrastructure through Wordlist Scanning.10

An adversary may enumerate resources using a compromised user’s access keys to determine which are available to that user.1 The discovery of these available resources may help adversaries determine their next steps in the Cloud environment, such as establishing Persistence.8An adversary may also use this information to change the configuration to make the bucket publicly accessible, allowing data to be accessed without authentication. Adversaries have also may use infrastructure discovery APIs such as DescribeDBInstances to determine size, owner, permissions, and network ACLs of database resources. 4 Adversaries can use this information to determine the potential value of databases and discover the requirements to access them. Unlike in Cloud Service Discovery, this technique focuses on the discovery of components of the provided services rather than the services themselves.

Item Value
ID T1580
Sub-techniques
Tactics TA0007
Platforms IaaS
Version 1.3
Created 20 August 2020
Last Modified 24 October 2025

Procedure Examples

ID Name Description
S1091 Pacu Pacu can enumerate AWS infrastructure, such as EC2 instances.11
G1015 Scattered Spider Scattered Spider enumerates cloud environments including Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 buckets to identify server and backup management infrastructure, resource access, databases and storage containers .141312
G1053 Storm-0501 Storm-0501 has enumerated compromised cloud environments to identify critical assets, data stores, and back resources.15

Mitigations

ID Mitigation Description
M1018 User Account Management Limit permissions to discover cloud infrastructure in accordance with least privilege. Organizations should limit the number of users within the organization with an IAM role that has administrative privileges, strive to reduce all permanent privileged role assignments, and conduct periodic entitlement reviews on IAM users, roles and policies.

References

  1. A. Randazzo, B. Manahan and S. Lipton. (2020, April 28). Finding Evil in AWS. Retrieved June 25, 2020. ↩

  2. Amazon Web Services. (n.d.). AWS HeadBucket. Retrieved February 14, 2022. ↩

  3. Amazon Web Services. (n.d.). Retrieved May 28, 2021. ↩

  4. Amazon Web Services. (n.d.). Retrieved May 28, 2021. ↩

  5. Amazon. (n.d.). describe-instance-information. Retrieved March 3, 2020. ↩

  6. Amazon. (n.d.). DescribeInstances. Retrieved May 26, 2020. ↩

  7. Google. (n.d.). gcloud compute instances list. Retrieved May 26, 2020. ↩

  8. Microsoft. (n.d.). az ad user. Retrieved October 6, 2019. ↩

  9. Vasilios Hioureas. (2019, September 13). Hacking with AWS: incorporating leaky buckets into your OSINT workflow. Retrieved February 14, 2022. ↩

  10. Rhino Security Labs. (2019, August 22). Pacu. Retrieved October 17, 2019. ↩

  11. Counter Adversary Operations. (2025, July 2). CrowdStrike Services Observes SCATTERED SPIDER Escalate Attacks Across Industries. Retrieved October 13, 2025. ↩

  12. Mandiant Incident Response. (2025, May 6). Defending Against UNC3944: Cybercrime Hardening Guidance from the Frontlines. Retrieved October 13, 2025. ↩

  13. Microsoft. (2023, October 25). Octo Tempest crosses boundaries to facilitate extortion, encryption, and destruction. Retrieved March 18, 2024. ↩

  14. Microsoft Threat Intelligence. (2025, August 27). Storm-0501’s evolving techniques lead to cloud-based ransomware. Retrieved October 19, 2025. ↩