Sunturai
Back to results
HighElastic detection rulesElastic

AWS S3 Bucket Replicated to Another Account

Identifies the creation or modification of an S3 bucket replication configuration that sends data to a bucket in a different AWS account. Cross-account replication can be used legitimately for backup, disaster…

Description

Identifies the creation or modification of an S3 bucket replication configuration that sends data to a bucket in a different AWS account. Cross-account replication can be used legitimately for backup, disaster recovery, and multi-account architectures, but adversaries with write access to an S3 bucket may abuse replication rules to silently exfiltrate large volumes of data to attacker-controlled accounts. This rule detects "PutBucketReplication" events where the configured destination account differs from the source bucket's account, indicating potential unauthorized cross-account data movement.

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.

Sign in to read itCreate an account

Detection requirements

Platform
ESXiIaaSLinuxmacOSOffice SuiteSaaSWindows

The rule states no platform. This is derived from the 2 ATT&CK techniques it maps to.

Log source category
event_index

Known benign triggers

  • Cross-account S3 replication is common in multi-account AWS Organizations, centralized logging architectures, and disaster-recovery designs. Confirm whether the destination account is an approved replication target. Unexpected replication configuration changes should be treated as suspicious.

Detections can measure how the public catalogue is used — which detections people look for, and which pages bring them here. It sets a cookie that recognises this browser for 180 days. It is never linked to an account and never follows you to other sites. Privacy notice