This rule identifies potentially suspicious activity by detecting instances where a single IAM user's temporary session token is accessed from multiple IP addresses within a short time frame. Such behavior may suggest that an adversary has compromised temporary credentials and is utilizing them from various locations. To enhance detection accuracy and minimize false positives, the rule incorporates criteria that evaluate unique IP addresses, user agents, cities, and networks. These additional checks help distinguish between legitimate distributed access patterns and potential credential misuse. Detected activities are classified into different types based on the combination of unique indicators, with each classification assigned a fidelity score reflecting the likelihood of malicious behavior. High fidelity scores are given to patterns most indicative of threats, such as multiple unique IPs, networks, cities, and user agents. Medium and low fidelity scores correspond to less severe patterns, enabling security teams to effectively prioritize alerts.

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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.id and user.name pair for these actions.

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Identifies AWS Bedrock Agent creation performed directly by an IAM user or the root account. Bedrock Agents are autonomous AI systems that execute multi-step tasks, invoke Lambda action groups to call external APIs, and query knowledge bases. Adversaries with access to an AWS account can create rogue agents configured to exfiltrate data via action group Lambda functions, pivot to other services, or act as a persistent AI-driven command-and-control channel. This rule is scoped to IAMUser and Root identity types — AssumedRole sessions (which represent automated CI/CD pipelines and SSO-federated engineers) are excluded to avoid global false positives from legitimate deployment automation that varies widely across customer environments.

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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 an Amazon Bedrock API key phantom user (an IAM user whose name starts with "BedrockAPIKey-") acting as the caller of a non-Bedrock API request, such as IAM, STS, EC2, VPC, or KMS calls. These users are provisioned by AWS to back a Bedrock bearer token and carry the AmazonBedrockLimitedAccess managed policy, which also grants IAM, VPC, and KMS reconnaissance. A phantom user performing activity outside of Bedrock indicates its credentials are being used beyond their intended scope, which is the privilege-escalation path realized: an attacker who created standard IAM access keys for the phantom user is now using them for reconnaissance or lateral movement outside the Bedrock authentication boundary.

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Identifies the evasion of cloudtrail logging for IAM actions involving policy creation, modification or attachment. When making certain policy-related API calls, an adversary may pad the associated policy document with whitespaces to trigger CloudTrail’s logging size constraints, resulting in incomplete logging where critical details about the policy are omitted. By exploiting this gap, threat actors can bypass monitoring performed through CloudTrail and can effectively obscure unauthorized changes. This rule looks for IAM API calls with the requestParameters property containing reason:”requestParameters too large” and omitted:true.

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Detects AWS access keys that are used from both GitHub Actions CI/CD infrastructure and non-CI/CD infrastructure. This pattern indicates potential credential theft where an attacker who has stolen AWS credentials configured as GitHub Actions secrets and is using them from their own infrastructure.

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Detects when a single AWS resource is running multiple read-only, discovery API calls in a 10-second window. This behavior could indicate an actor attempting to discover the AWS infrastructure using compromised credentials or a compromised instance. Adversaries may use this information to identify potential targets for further exploitation or to gain a better understanding of the target's infrastructure.

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Identifies deletion of the AWS account password policy via DeleteAccountPasswordPolicy. The account password policy enforces minimum password requirements (length, complexity, rotation, and reuse) for all IAM users in the account. Deleting it removes those requirements account-wide, weakening authentication and easing follow-on credential-based attacks. This is an account-level change that legitimately occurs only during deliberate administration, so its deletion by an unexpected principal warrants review.

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An adversary with access to a set of compromised credentials may attempt to persist or escalate privileges by attaching additional permissions to user groups the compromised user account belongs to. This rule looks for use of the IAM AttachGroupPolicy API operation to attach the highly permissive AdministratorAccess AWS managed policy to an existing IAM user group.

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An adversary with access to a set of compromised credentials may attempt to persist or escalate privileges by attaching additional permissions to compromised IAM roles. This rule looks for use of the IAM AttachRolePolicy API operation to attach the highly permissive AdministratorAccess AWS managed policy to an existing IAM role.

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An adversary with access to a set of compromised credentials may attempt to persist or escalate privileges by attaching additional permissions to compromised user accounts. This rule looks for use of the IAM AttachUserPolicy API operation to attach the highly permissive AdministratorAccess AWS managed policy to an existing IAM user.

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Detects sensitive AWS IAM API operations executed using temporary session credentials (access key IDs beginning with "ASIA"). Temporary credentials are commonly issued through sts:GetSessionToken, sts:AssumeRole, or AWS SSO logins and are meant for short-term use. It is unusual for legitimate users or automated processes to perform privileged IAM actions (e.g., creating users, updating policies, or enabling/disabling MFA) with session tokens. This behavior may indicate credential theft, session hijacking, or the abuse of a privileged role’s temporary credentials.

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This rule looks for use of the IAM AttachUserPolicy API operation to attach the CompromisedKeyQuarantine or CompromisedKeyQuarantineV2 AWS managed policies to an existing IAM user. This policy denies access to certain actions and is applied by the AWS team in the event that an IAM user's credentials have been compromised or exposed publicly.

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Detects the creation of an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user initiated by an assumed role on an EC2 instance. Assumed roles allow users or services to temporarily adopt different AWS permissions, but the creation of IAM users through these roles, particularly from within EC2 instances, may indicate a compromised instance. Adversaries might exploit such permissions to establish persistence by creating new IAM users under unauthorized conditions.

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Identifies standard IAM credentials being added to an Amazon Bedrock API key phantom user, whose user name starts with "BedrockAPIKey-": either a long-term access key (CreateAccessKey) or a console password / login profile (CreateLoginProfile, UpdateLoginProfile). When a long-term Bedrock API key is generated through the AWS Console, AWS silently provisions a "BedrockAPIKey-" IAM user with the AmazonBedrockLimitedAccess managed policy. That user is intended only to back a Bedrock bearer token and should never hold standard programmatic keys or interactive console access. Adding either converts a Bedrock-scoped identity into general-purpose IAM credentials that inherit the policy's Bedrock control-plane and IAM, VPC, and KMS reconnaissance permissions and that persist after the Bedrock API key is revoked. This is the privilege-escalation and persistence pivot documented for Bedrock API key phantom users, and there is no legitimate workflow that produces it.

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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:CreatePolicyVersion or iam:SetDefaultPolicyVersion on 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 the deactivation of a Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) device in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). MFA provides critical protection against unauthorized access by requiring a second factor for authentication. Adversaries or compromised administrators may deactivate MFA devices to weaken account protections, disable strong authentication, or prepare for privilege escalation or persistence. This rule monitors successful DeactivateMFADevice API calls, which represent the point at which MFA protection is actually removed.

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Identifies the creation of a group in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). Groups specify permissions for multiple users. Any user in a group automatically has the permissions that are assigned to the group. Adversaries who obtain credentials with IAM write privileges may create a new group as a foothold for persistence: they can later attach admin-level policies to the group and quietly add users or roles to inherit those privileges.

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Detects when an IAM group is deleted using the DeleteGroup API call. Deletion of an IAM group may represent a malicious attempt to remove audit trails, disrupt operations, or hide adversary activity (for example after using the group briefly for privileged access). This can be an indicator of impact or cleanup in an attack lifecycle.

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Identifies an inline policy added to an IAM group via PutGroupPolicy. An inline policy attached to a group grants its permissions to every current and future member of that group. Adversaries can abuse this to escalate privileges (grant elevated permissions to a group they belong to, or will add themselves to) and to establish persistence through a durable, membership-based grant that is easy to overlook. Group inline policies are uncommon compared to managed-policy attachments, so their creation by an unexpected principal warrants review.

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Identifies creation of a console login profile for the AWS account root user. While CreateLoginProfile normally applies to IAM users, when performed from a temporary root session (e.g., via AssumeRoot) and the userName parameter is omitted, the profile is created for the root principal (self-assigned). Adversaries with temporary root access may add or reset the root login profile to establish persistent console access even if original access keys are rotated or disabled. Correlate with recent AssumeRoot/STS activity and validate intent with the account owner.

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Identifies creation or modification of a console login profile for an AWS IAM user via CreateLoginProfile or UpdateLoginProfile. A login profile enables password-based console sign-in for an IAM user. Adversaries who obtain programmatic credentials may create a login profile to add persistent interactive console access, or update an existing profile to reset another user's password and take over the account, even after the original access keys are rotated. Because console access for IAM users is increasingly provisioned through federation or IAM Identity Center, direct use of these APIs by an unexpected principal warrants review. This rule targets IAM users (the userName parameter is present); creation of a login profile for the account root user is covered by a separate rule.

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Correlates open detection alerts that share the same long-term IAM access key ID ( prefix AKIA). It fires when the rule AWS Long-Term Access Key First Seen from Source IP (rule_id: 9f8e3c5e-f72e-4e91-93f6-e98a4fae3e4f) has triggered for that key and at least one other open alert for the same key is medium, high, or critical severity. This higher-order rule helps prioritize long-term key novelty when it co-occurs with elevated detections that may indicate post-compromise activity.

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Identifies the first time, within the configured history window, that a long-term IAM access key ID (prefix AKIA) is used successfully from a given source.ip in AWS CloudTrail. Long-term access keys belong to IAM users or the account root user. They are a common target after credential theft or leakage, including supply-chain and exposed-key scenarios. Temporary security credentials (prefix ASIA) and console sessions are excluded so the signal emphasizes programmatic access patterns.

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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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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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Identifies the modification or removal of an IAM permissions boundary on an IAM user or role. A permissions boundary caps the maximum permissions an identity can have, regardless of its attached identity policies. An adversary who can delete a boundary ("DeleteUserPermissionsBoundary", "DeleteRolePermissionsBoundary") or replace it with a more permissive one ("PutUserPermissionsBoundary", "PutRolePermissionsBoundary") can lift that cap and unlock permissions the identity's policies already grant, enabling privilege escalation. Boundary changes are infrequent and usually performed by a small set of administrators or infrastructure-as-code pipelines, so changes by unexpected principals warrant review.

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Detects repeated failed attempts to update an IAM role’s trust policy in an AWS account, consistent with role and user enumeration techniques. In this technique, an attacker who controls credentials in the current account repeatedly calls UpdateAssumeRolePolicy on a single role, cycling through guessed cross-account role or user ARNs as the principal. When those principals are invalid, IAM returns MalformedPolicyDocumentException, producing a burst of failed UpdateAssumeRolePolicy events. This rule alerts on that brute-force pattern originating from this account, which may indicate that the account is being used as attack infrastructure or that offensive tooling (such as Pacu) is running here. Note: this rule does not detect other accounts enumerating roles, because those API calls are logged in the caller’s account, not the target account.

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Detects the creation of a new AWS IAM Roles Anywhere profile. Roles Anywhere allows workloads or external systems to assume IAM roles from outside AWS by authenticating via trusted certificate authorities (trust anchors). Adversaries who have established persistence through a rogue trust anchor may create or modify profiles to link them with highly privileged roles, enabling long-term external access to the AWS environment. This rule identifies successful "CreateProfile" API calls and helps detect potentially unauthorized or risky external access configurations.

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Detects the creation of an AWS IAM Roles Anywhere Trust Anchor that uses an external certificate authority (CA) rather than an AWS-managed Certificate Manager Private CA (ACM PCA). While Roles Anywhere enables secure, short-term credential issuance for workloads outside AWS, adversaries can exploit this feature by registering their own external CA as a trusted root. This allows them to generate valid client certificates that persistently authenticate to AWS roles from any location, even after key rotation or credential revocation events. This rule helps detect persistence or unauthorized federation attempts by flagging trust anchors configured with non-AWS CAs.

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Detects the creation of a new SAML Identity Provider (IdP) in AWS IAM. SAML providers enable federated authentication between AWS and external identity providers, allowing users to access AWS resources using credentials from the external IdP. Adversaries who have gained administrative access may create rogue SAML providers to establish persistent, federated access to AWS accounts that survives credential rotation. This technique allows attackers to assume roles and access resources by forging SAML assertions from an IdP they control. Creating a SAML provider is a rare administrative action that should be closely monitored and validated against authorized infrastructure changes.

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Detects when an AWS IAM SAML provider is updated, which manages federated authentication between AWS and external identity providers (IdPs). Adversaries with administrative access may modify a SAML provider’s metadata or certificate to redirect authentication flows, enable unauthorized federation, or escalate privileges through identity trust manipulation. Because SAML providers underpin single sign-on (SSO) access for users and applications, unauthorized modifications may allow persistent or covert access even after credentials are revoked. Monitoring "UpdateSAMLProvider" API activity is critical to detect potential compromise of federated trust relationships.

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Detects successful IAM API calls that create or empower IAM users and roles, attach or embed policies, or wire roles to instance profiles when the caller is an assumed role session associated with AWS Lambda. Serverless execution roles are often over-permissioned; an adversary who can run or compromise function code can abuse these APIs for privilege escalation and persistence—for example creating users or roles, issuing keys, attaching managed or inline policies, or preparing EC2 instance profiles for lateral movement.

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Identifies the addition of a user to a specified group in AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). Any user added to a group automatically gains the permissions that are assigned to the group. If the target group carries elevated or admin privileges, this action can instantly grant high-risk permissions useful for credential misuse, lateral movement, or privilege escalation.

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Identifies an IAM user that successfully signs in to the AWS Management Console from two or more distinct countries within a short window. A single user authenticating from multiple geographic locations in a brief period is physically implausible and indicates that the account's credentials or console session are being used from more than one place at once. This is a hallmark of adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) phishing and session theft, where the legitimate user signs in from their location while the attacker replays the captured session or credentials from their own infrastructure. Because the attacker logs in from a different network, the divergent sign-in geolocations are the detectable signal even when MFA appears satisfied (AiTM relays the live MFA challenge). This is the CloudTrail-native analog of identity-provider impossible-travel sign-in detections.

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Identifies the first observed occurrence, within the configured New Terms history window, of a regular IAM user successfully signing in to the AWS Management Console without multi-factor authentication. A password alone is a weaker control than password-plus-MFA, and an adversary who has phished, guessed, or otherwise obtained a user's password can sign in directly if MFA is not enforced for that user. This rule is scoped to standard IAM users only; it excludes the AWS root user (covered by a dedicated rule) and federated/SSO sign-ins (covered by a dedicated rule that also accounts for IdP-side MFA), since MFAUsed: No is expected in both of those cases for reasons unrelated to this gap.

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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 CreateAccessKey API operation to create new programmatic access keys for another IAM user.

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Detects an AWS IAM user using an existing credential to create a new access key for itself and subsequently using the new key within one hour. This behavior can indicate an adversary converting compromised credentials into an additional long-term credential for persistence. Unlike a standalone self-service key creation alert, requiring subsequent use of the new key reduces noise from unused or abandoned credential-rotation operations.

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Detects attempts to create or enable a Virtual MFA device (CreateVirtualMFADevice, EnableMFADevice) using temporary AWS credentials (access keys beginning with ASIA). Session credentials are short-lived and tied to existing authenticated sessions, so using them to register or enable MFA devices is unusual. Adversaries who compromise temporary credentials may abuse this behavior to establish persistence by attaching new MFA devices to maintain access to high-privilege accounts despite key rotation or password resets.

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Detects when credentials issued through AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity for a Kubernetes service account identity are later used for several distinct AWS control-plane actions on the same session access key. Workloads that use EKS IAM Roles for Service Accounts routinely exchange a projected service-account token for short-lived IAM credentials; this rule highlights sessions where that exchange is followed by a spread of sensitive APIs—reconnaissance, secrets and parameter access, IAM changes, or compute creation—beyond what routine pod traffic usually shows. High-volume S3 object reads and writes are excluded from the correlation set to reduce noise from normal data-plane work.

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Identifies sensitive AWS IAM operations performed via AWS CloudShell based on the user agent string. CloudShell is a browser-based shell that provides command-line access to AWS resources directly from the AWS Management Console. While convenient for administrators, CloudShell access from compromised console sessions can enable attackers to perform privileged operations without installing tools or using programmatic credentials. This rule detects high-risk actions such as creating IAM users, access keys, roles, or attaching policies when initiated from CloudShell, which may indicate post-compromise credential harvesting or privilege escalation activity.

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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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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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