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AWS IAM Permission Boundary or Guardrail Policy Deleted by Unusual Identity
Sep 19, 2026 · Domain: Cloud Data Source: AWS Data Source: Amazon Web Services Data Source: AWS IAM Use Case: Identity and Access Audit Tactic: Defense Evasion Tactic: Persistence Resources: Investigation Guide Noise: Unknown Performance: Very Slow Profile: Aggressive Rule Type: New Terms Platform: AWS Data Source: AWS CloudTrail Service: AWS IAM ·Detects the first time an AWS identity successfully deletes an IAM managed policy whose ARN contains guardrail-related keywords (for example Boundary, Deny, Restrict, Guard, SCP, Guardrail). Adversaries who have obtained elevated IAM privileges may delete policies to remove restrictive permissions boundaries, eliminate deny-based guardrails, or clean up after a privilege escalation operation. Infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, and Ansible) are excluded because policy lifecycle management is a routine part of automated deployments. A policy deletion by an identity not seen performing this activity during the prior seven days may indicate newly compromised credentials being used to modify the account's permission structure.
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