T1098.003: Additional Cloud Roles

MITRE ATT&CK Content An adversary may add additional roles or permissions to an adversary-controlled cloud account to maintain persistent access to a tenant. For example, adversaries may update IAM policies in cloud-based environments or add a new global administrator in Office 365 environments. With sufficient permissions, a compromised account can gain almost unlimited access to data and settings (including the ability to reset the passwords of other admins). This account modification may immediately follow Create Account [MITRE] or other malicious account activity. Adversaries may also modify existing Valid Accounts [MITRE] that they have compromised. This could lead to privilege escalation, particularly if the roles added allow for lateral movement to additional accounts. For example, in AWS environments, an adversary with appropriate permissions may be able to use the CreatePolicyVersion API to define a new version of an IAM policy or the AttachUserPolicy API to attach an IAM policy with additional or distinct permissions to a compromised user account. In some cases, adversaries may add roles to adversary-controlled accounts outside the victim cloud tenant. This allows these external accounts to perform actions inside the victim tenant without requiring the adversary to Create Account [MITRE] or modify a victim-owned account. AWS Specific Content A prerequisite for this technique is that a threat actor has already gained control of an AWS identity with the permissions to perform the actions in the AWS CloudTrail Event Name(s) section. With access to an AWS identity that has the appropriate permissions, threat actors may add IAM Roles to the AWS account or add IAM policies to identities that the threat actor has control over in order to provide persistent access to a threat actor, or alter the level and type of access previously granted. Threat actors may also use UpdateAssumeRolePolicy to modify the trust policy of existing IAM roles, allowing identities under threat actor's control, or external accounts to assume roles with elevated privileges without creating new roles.