Add A Policy To A User (aws)

Platform	Author	Last Update
aws	Nick Jones	2024-12-02

An adversary may attempt to add a policy to a user, in order to escalate the privileges of that user.

MITRE IDs

• T1098

Required Permissions

• iam:AttachUserPolicy

Required Parameters

Name	Type	Description	Example Value
user	str	User to add policy to	root
policyarn	str	Policy to add to user	arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/ReadOnlyAccess

Attacker Action

aws iam attach-user-policy --user-name  --policy-arn

Detection Case

ELK query

When logs are ingested into ELK, the following Lucene query can be used to identify relevant events.

eventName:AttachUserPolicy AND eventSource:iam.amazonaws.com

Sigma Definition

---
title: Add a policy to a user
id: ca08ef1e-c37a-4a7e-b1a0-670519faacc2
status: experimental
author: Nick Jones
date: 2024-12-02
description: An adversary may attempt to add a policy to a user, in order to escalate the privileges of that user.
logsource:
  service: cloudtrail
detection:
  selection_source:
    - eventSource: "iam.amazonaws.com"
  events:
    - eventName: "AttachUserPolicy"
  condition: selection_source and events
level: low
tags:
  - attack.T1098


falsepositives:
  - Developers making legitimate changes to the environment. Verify whether the user identity, user agent, and/or hostname should be making changes in your environment.