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.(Citation: Microsoft O365 Admin Roles)(Citation: Microsoft Support O365 Add Another Admin, October 2019)(Citation: AWS Create IAM User)(Citation: GCP Create Cloud Identity Users)(Citation: Microsoft Azure AD Users)
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.(Citation: Microsoft Entra ID Service Principals) In GCP, service accounts can also be linked to specific resources, as well as be impersonated by other accounts for Temporary Elevated Cloud Access.(Citation: GCP Service Accounts) While AWS has no specific concept of service accounts, resources can be directly granted permission to assume roles.(Citation: AWS Instance Profiles)(Citation: AWS Lambda Execution Role)
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.
View in MITRE ATT&CK®| Capability ID | Capability Description | Mapping Type | ATT&CK ID | ATT&CK Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| action.hacking.variety.Profile host | Enumerating the state of the current host | related-to | T1136.003 | Cloud Account | |
| attribute.integrity.variety.Created account | Created new user account | related-to | T1136.003 | Cloud Account |
| Capability ID | Capability Description | Mapping Type | ATT&CK ID | ATT&CK Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| identity_platform | Identity Platform | technique_scores | T1136.003 | Cloud Account |
Comments
Identity Platform multi-tenancy uses tenants to create unique silos of users and configurations within a single Identity Platform project. It provides provides secure, easy-to-use authentication if you're building a service on Google Cloud, on your own backend or on another platform; thereby, helping to mitigate adversaries from gaining access to systems.
References
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| recaptcha_enterprise | ReCAPTCHA Enterprise | technique_scores | T1136.003 | Cloud Account |
Comments
ReCAPTCHA Enterprise can implement a number of mitigations to prevent the automated creation of multiple accounts such as adding checkbox challenges on pages where end users need to enter their credentials and assessing user activity for potential misuses on all pages where accounts are created.
Since this control doesn't prevent the manual creation of accounts, it has been given a rating of Partial.
References
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| security_command_center | Security Command Center | technique_scores | T1136.003 | Cloud Account |
Comments
SCC ingests admin activity from Cloud Audit logs to detect when new service accounts are created. This security solution protects against potential adversary generated accounts used for initial access or to maintain persistence. Because of the temporal factor to detect this attack the control was graded as significant.
References
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