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Detects the first occurrence in 7 days of an AWS identity attaching the managed policy AmazonSESFullAccess to an IAM user, role, or group. AmazonSESFullAccess grants unrestricted permission to send email, manage identities and templates, manage suppression lists, and access SES account-level settings. Granting this policy to an unexpected IAM entity, particularly a newly created user or a role not previously associated with email operations, is a documented technique used by threat actors to establish phishing infrastructure on compromised AWS accounts, enabling them to send email on behalf of the victim organization's trusted sending domain. Using new terms on the calling identity suppresses recurring attachments by known email automation while surfacing identities performing this action for the first time.
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Detects the creation of an AWS Bedrock AgentCore resource (code interpreter, agent runtime, browser, or harness) with an IAM execution role attached. When an attacker with iam:PassRole permission creates an AgentCore resource and attaches a privileged role, subsequent invocations inside that resource execute as the attached role — enabling privilege escalation to roles that trust bedrock-agentcore.amazonaws.com.
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Identifies the first time, within a lookback window, an identity performs AWS Organizations or IAM account enumeration APIs. Attackers with compromised credentials often map the organization (accounts, OUs, roots, delegated admins) and account-level metadata (aliases, summary) using the AWS CLI or SDKs. This is a New Terms rule detecting a rare occurrence of the
cloud.account.idanduser.namepair for these actions.
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Identifies AWS CloudTrail events where an IAM role's trust policy has been updated by an IAM user or Assumed Role identity. The trust policy is a JSON document that defines which principals are allowed to assume the role. An attacker may attempt to modify this policy to gain the privileges of the role. This is a New Terms rule, which means it will only trigger once for each unique combination of the "cloud.account.id", "user.name" and "entity.target.id" fields, that have not been seen making this API request.
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Identifies successful IAM API calls that create a new customer managed policy version or set the default version for an existing customer managed policy. Attackers with
iam:CreatePolicyVersionoriam:SetDefaultPolicyVersionon a privileged policy can introduce a permissive policy document and activate it, escalating effective permissions without attaching a new policy. These APIs are high impact when the target policy is attached to powerful roles or users.
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Detects when an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) customer-managed policy is attached to a role by an unusual or unauthorized user. Customer-managed policies are policies created and controlled within an AWS account, granting specific permissions to roles or users when attached. This rule identifies potential privilege escalation by flagging cases where a customer-managed policy is attached to a role by an unexpected actor, which could signal unauthorized access or misuse. Attackers may attach policies to roles to expand permissions and elevate their privileges within the AWS environment. This is a New Terms rule that uses the "cloud.account.id", "user.name" and "entity.target.id" fields to check if the combination of the actor identity and target role name has not been seen before.
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Detects when an uncommon user or role creates an OpenID Connect (OIDC) Identity Provider in AWS IAM. OIDC providers enable web identity federation, allowing users authenticated by external identity providers (such as Google, GitHub, or custom OIDC-compliant providers) to assume IAM roles and access AWS resources. Adversaries who have gained administrative access may create rogue OIDC providers to establish persistent, federated access that survives credential rotation. This technique allows attackers to assume roles using tokens from an IdP they control. While OIDC provider creation is benign in some environments, it should still be validated against authorized infrastructure changes.
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An adversary with access to a set of compromised credentials may attempt to persist or escalate privileges by creating a new set of credentials for an existing user. This rule looks for use of the IAM
CreateAccessKeyAPI operation to create new programmatic access keys for another IAM user.
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