Additional Cloud Roles

Executive Summary

Additional Cloud Roles (T1098.003) is a MITRE ATT&CK technique associated with Persistence, Privilege Escalation. An adversary may add additional roles or permissions to an adversary-controlled cloud account to maintain persistent access to a tenant.

Why Attackers Use It

Attackers use Additional Cloud Roles because it provides a reliable way to advance their objective within the Persistence, Privilege Escalation tactic, often with a favorable balance of impact versus detectability on IaaS, Identity Provider, Office Suite, SaaS environments. Defenders should assess this behavior in the context of the affected platform and adjacent activity rather than treating it as a standalone indicator.

MITRE Description

An adversary may add additional roles or permissions to an adversary-controlled cloud account to maintain persistent access to a tenant. For example, adversaries may update IAM policies in cloud-based environments or add a new global administrator in Office 365 environments.(Citation: AWS IAM Policies and Permissions)(Citation: Google Cloud IAM Policies)(Citation: Microsoft Support O365 Add Another Admin, October 2019)(Citation: Microsoft O365 Admin Roles) With sufficient permissions, a compromised account can gain almost unlimited access to data and settings (including the ability to reset the passwords of other admins).(Citation: Expel AWS Attacker) (Citation: Microsoft O365 Admin Roles)

This account modification may immediately follow Create Account or other malicious account activity. Adversaries may also modify existing Valid Accounts that they have compromised. This could lead to privilege escalation, particularly if the roles added allow for lateral movement to additional accounts.

For example, in AWS environments, an adversary with appropriate permissions may be able to use the <code>CreatePolicyVersion</code> API to define a new version of an IAM policy or the <code>AttachUserPolicy</code> API to attach an IAM policy with additional or distinct permissions to a compromised user account.(Citation: Rhino Security Labs AWS Privilege Escalation)

In some cases, adversaries may add roles to adversary-controlled accounts outside the victim cloud tenant. This allows these external accounts to perform actions inside the victim tenant without requiring the adversary to Create Account or modify a victim-owned account.(Citation: Invictus IR DangerDev 2024)

Attack Flow

1. Attacker gains the prerequisite access or context described below.
2. Attacker executes Additional Cloud Roles to achieve its tactical objective (Persistence, Privilege Escalation).
3. Resulting access/data/effect is leveraged to advance the broader attack chain (see Related Techniques).

Prerequisites

• Platform(s): IaaS, Identity Provider, Office Suite, SaaS
• ATT&CK does not define one universal permission requirement for this technique. Establish the required access from the observed implementation and affected platform.

Common Tools

• Tool attribution is implementation-specific. Use ATT&CK procedure examples and local telemetry to identify the binaries, services, scripts, accounts, or cloud resources involved.

Commands

No universal command represents Additional Cloud Roles. Capture the exact command line, arguments, parent process, account, host, and execution time from the investigated environment; do not operationalize unverified examples.

Network Traffic

• Network observability is implementation-dependent. Review DNS, proxy, firewall, flow, authentication, and packet telemetry around the activity window, then correlate remote endpoints and protocol behavior with host evidence.

Windows Events

Sysmon Events

Detection Opportunities

No MITRE detection guidance published for this technique.

Relevant ATT&CK Data Sources: N/A

Sigma Rules

A universal Sigma rule would create unreliable results because this technique has no single guaranteed observable. Build detection logic from a documented behavior and supported data source, scope it to the affected platform, and validate it against benign administrative activity before deployment.

Splunk Queries

Start with the data sources named in the detection section. Scope searches by asset, identity, and time window; correlate the primary behavior with preceding access and subsequent actions. A portable query is intentionally not provided where the technique lacks a universal schema or observable.

Investigation Workflow

1. Confirm that the observed behavior is consistent with Additional Cloud Roles and rule out expected administrative or application activity.
2. Establish the first-seen time, initiating identity, source system, target system, and affected resources.
3. Collect relevant host, identity, network, cloud, and application telemetry for the surrounding time window.
4. Correlate parent and child activity, remote connections, file or configuration changes, and related ATT&CK techniques.
5. Determine scope by searching for the same observable across peer assets and identities.
6. Preserve volatile evidence and record confidence, assumptions, and telemetry gaps before containment.

Containment

1. Isolate affected host(s)/account(s) identified during investigation.
2. Revoke or rotate any credentials/tokens potentially exposed.
3. Apply the mitigations listed below where not already enforced.
4. Validate no related techniques (see Related Techniques) were chained against the same asset.

Mitigation

• M1026 -- Privileged Account Management: Privileged Account Management focuses on implementing policies, controls, and tools to securely manage privileged accounts (e.g., SYSTEM, root, or administrative accounts).
• M1032 -- Multi-factor Authentication: Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) enhances security by requiring users to provide at least two forms of verification to prove their identity before granting access.
• M1018 -- User Account Management: User Account Management involves implementing and enforcing policies for the lifecycle of user accounts, including creation, modification, and deactivation.

Related Techniques

• T1098