Possible privilege escalation via AWS login profile manipulation

cloudtrail

Classification:

attack

Tactic:

TA0003-persistence

Technique:

T1098-account-manipulation

Goal

Detect a user or role attempting to create or update the password for a specified IAM user.

Strategy

This rule allows you to monitor CloudTrail and detect if an attacker has attempted to create or update a password for an IAM user using the CreateLoginProfile or UpdateLoginProfile API calls respectively.

Triage and response

  1. Determine if {{@userIdentity.session_name}} should have made a {{@evt.name}} API call.
  2. If the API call was not made by the user:
  • Rotate user credentials.
  • Determine what other API calls were made by the user.
  • Remove any passwords generated by the user with the aws-cli command delete-login-profile or use the AWS Console.
  1. If the API call was made by the user:
  • Determine if the user should be performing this API call.
  • If No, see if other API calls were made by the user and determine if they warrant further investigation.

ChangeLog

27 June 2023 - Updated rule query, name, case, goal and strategy to reflect login profile creation and login profile update.