Identity-and-Access-Audit

An Elastic machine learning rule detects unusual user logon times, which can indicate credential compromise or unauthorized access, particularly when attackers operate from different time zones or during non-business hours, prompting investigation into the affected user account and related activities.

This threat brief describes a detection for suspicious activity where an AWS IAM user's temporary session token is accessed from multiple distinct IP addresses, networks, cities, and user agents within a short timeframe, indicating potentially compromised credentials used for initial access and resource manipulation.

Adversaries with administrative access to an AWS account can create rogue SAML Identity Providers (IdPs) to establish persistent, federated access to AWS resources that survives credential rotation, enabling them to assume roles and access resources by forging SAML assertions from an IdP they control.

Adversaries are exploiting compromised temporary AWS session credentials (access keys starting with 'ASIA') to register or enable virtual MFA devices, establishing persistence and maintaining access to high-privilege accounts even after credential rotation or password resets.

Adversaries with elevated privileges within Google Workspace may delete custom administrative roles to impede security operations, remove delegated administrator access, or obfuscate their activities during an active incident, leading to disrupted delegated administration, loss of security team access, or hindrance of incident response efforts.