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AWSCloudTrail - Privilege escalation with admin managed policy

Description

Detects successful attachment of admin-related managed IAM policies to users, roles, or groups, excluding the dedicated AdministratorAccess and FullAccess patterns handled by other detections. This behavior may indicate unauthorized privilege escalation and should be validated against approved administrative changes.

Rule type: Scheduled
Version: 1.0.2
Declared status: Available
Query frequency: 1d
Query period: 1d
Trigger: gt 0

Declared MITRE coverage

Declared sources

Metadata from the source file. No dependencies inferred from KQL.

Connectors

AWS

Data types

AWSCloudTrail

KQL query

Original query, unchanged.

AWSCloudTrail
| where  EventName in ("AttachUserPolicy","AttachRolePolicy","AttachGroupPolicy") and isempty(ErrorCode) and isempty(ErrorMessage)
| where tostring(parse_json(RequestParameters).policyArn) contains "Admin" and tostring(parse_json(RequestParameters).policyArn) !contains "FullAccess" and tostring(parse_json(RequestParameters).policyArn) !startswith "arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AdministratorAccess"
| extend UserIdentityArn = iif(isempty(UserIdentityArn), tostring(parse_json(Resources)[0].ARN), UserIdentityArn)
| extend UserName = tostring(split(UserIdentityArn, '/')[-1])
| extend AccountName = case( UserIdentityPrincipalid == "Anonymous", "Anonymous", isempty(UserIdentityUserName), UserName, UserIdentityUserName)
| extend AccountName = iif(AccountName contains "@", tostring(split(AccountName, '@', 0)[0]), AccountName),
  AccountUPNSuffix = iif(AccountName contains "@", tostring(split(AccountName, '@', 1)[0]), "")
| project TimeGenerated, EventName, EventTypeName, UserIdentityAccountId, UserIdentityPrincipalid, UserAgent, RecipientAccountId, AccountName, AccountUPNSuffix, UserIdentityUserName, SessionMfaAuthenticated, SourceIpAddress, AWSRegion, EventSource, AdditionalEventData, RequestParameters, ResponseElements, UserIdentityArn

Declared entities

AccountIP

Source provenance

GitHub

Displayed values come from files in Azure/Azure-Sentinel. They describe the published template, not your workspace configuration.

File: Solutions/Amazon Web Services/Analytic Rules/AWS_PrivilegeEscalationAdminManagedPolicy.yaml ↗
Commit: 9800e51 ↗
Source identifier: 49ce5322-60d7-4b02-ad79-99f650aa5790

Additional source files 2

Solutions/Amazon Web Services/Analytic Rules/AWS_PrivilegeEscalationAdminManagedPolicy.yamlsource ↗Solutions/Amazon Web Services/Data/Solution_AmazonWebServices.jsonsolution-membership ↗

GSTEP / CATALOG TRACKING

Added to catalog : 16 Sept 2026 · 05:49 UTC
Last change observed : 16 Sept 2026 · 05:49 UTC

GSTEP sync dates, separate from the source content’s publication dates.