Permission Groups Discovery: Cloud Groups

Adversaries may attempt to find cloud groups and permission settings. The knowledge of cloud permission groups can help adversaries determine the particular roles of users and groups within an environment, as well as which users are associated with a particular group.

With authenticated access there are several tools that can be used to find permissions groups. The Get-MsolRole PowerShell cmdlet can be used to obtain roles and permissions groups for Exchange and Office 365 accounts [1][2].

Azure CLI (AZ CLI) and the Google Cloud Identity Provider API also provide interfaces to obtain permissions groups. The command az ad user get-member-groups will list groups associated to a user account for Azure while the API endpoint GET https://cloudidentity.googleapis.com/v1/groups lists group resources available to a user for Google.[3][4][5] In AWS, the commands ListRolePolicies and ListAttachedRolePolicies allow users to enumerate the policies attached to a role.[6]

Adversaries may attempt to list ACLs for objects to determine the owner and other accounts with access to the object, for example, via the AWS GetBucketAcl API [7]. Using this information an adversary can target accounts with permissions to a given object or leverage accounts they have already compromised to access the object.

ID: T1069.003
Sub-technique of:  T1069
Tactic: Discovery
Platforms: Azure AD, Google Workspace, IaaS, Office 365, SaaS
Contributors: Isif Ibrahima, Mandiant; Regina Elwell
Version: 1.4
Created: 21 February 2020
Last Modified: 21 March 2023

Procedure Examples

ID Name Description
S0677 AADInternals

AADInternals can enumerate Azure AD groups.[8]

C0027 C0027

During C0027, Scattered Spider accessed Azure AD to download bulk lists of group members and their Active Directory attributes.[9]

S1091 Pacu

Pacu can enumerate IAM permissions.[10]

S0684 ROADTools

ROADTools can enumerate Azure AD groups.[11]

Mitigations

This type of attack technique cannot be easily mitigated with preventive controls since it is based on the abuse of system features.

Detection

ID Data Source Data Component Detects
DS0015 Application Log Application Log Content

Monitor for events collected that may attempt to find cloud groups and permission settings.

DS0017 Command Command Execution

Monitor for executed commands and arguments that may attempt to find cloud groups and permission settings.

DS0036 Group Group Enumeration

Monitor for an extracted list of available groups and/or their associated setting

Group Metadata

Contextual data about a group which describes group and activity around it that may attempt to find cloud groups and permission settings.

DS0009 Process Process Creation

Monitor newly executed processes that may attempt to find cloud groups and permission settings.

References