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)
Adversaries may create accounts that only have access to specific cloud services, which can reduce the chance of detection.
View in MITRE ATT&CK®| Capability ID | Capability Description | Mapping Type | ATT&CK ID | ATT&CK Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| attribute.integrity.variety.Created account | Created new user account | related-to | T1136.003 | Create Account: Cloud Account |
| Capability ID | Capability Description | Mapping Type | ATT&CK ID | ATT&CK Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aws_config | AWS Config | technique_scores | T1136.003 | Cloud Account |
Comments
The following AWS Config managed rules can identify configuration problems that should be fixed in order to ensure multi-factor authentication (MFA) is enabled properly, which can provide significant protection against attempted manipulation of cloud accounts, including the creation of new ones: "iam-user-mfa-enabled", "mfa-enabled-for-iam-console-access", "root-account-hardware-mfa-enabled", and "root-account-mfa-enabled". All of these controls are run periodically and provide partial coverage, since adversaries may be able to create cloud credentials via other mechanisms, resulting in an overall score of Partial.
References
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