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AWS CloudTrail Log Evasion

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…

Description

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.

Detection logic

Its licence does not clear it for publishing here

Sunturai publishes a detection's own text where the licence it arrived under has been reviewed and permits it, and Elastic License 2.0 has not. The query as its source wrote it, its canonical form and the hash that pins this revision are in the workspace record.

Detection requirements

Platform
ContainersESXiIaaSIdentity ProviderLinuxmacOSNetwork DevicesOffice SuiteSaaSWindows

The rule states no platform. This is derived from the ATT&CK technique it maps to.

Log source category
event_index

Known benign triggers

  • There is no known legitimate reason for padding policies with white spaces to the extent it would take to trigger Cloudtrail's logging constraints. Any instance of this should be investigated.

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