Cloud Storage Object Discovery

Adversaries may enumerate objects in cloud storage infrastructure. Adversaries may use this information during automated discovery to shape follow-on behaviors, including requesting all or specific objects from cloud storage. Similar to File and Directory Discovery on a local host, after identifying available storage services (i.e. Cloud Infrastructure Discovery) adversaries may access the contents/objects stored in cloud infrastructure.

Cloud service providers offer APIs allowing users to enumerate objects stored within cloud storage. Examples include ListObjectsV2 in AWS [1] and List Blobs in Azure[2] .

ID: T1619
Sub-techniques:  No sub-techniques
Tactic: Discovery
Platforms: IaaS
Contributors: Isif Ibrahima, Mandiant; Regina Elwell
Version: 1.0
Created: 01 October 2021
Last Modified: 24 October 2025

Procedure Examples

ID Name Description
S1091 Pacu

Pacu can enumerate AWS storage services, such as S3 buckets and Elastic Block Store volumes.[3]

S0683 Peirates

Peirates can list AWS S3 buckets.[4]

Mitigations

ID Mitigation Description
M1018 User Account Management

Restrict granting of permissions related to listing objects in cloud storage to necessary accounts.

Detection Strategy

ID Name Analytic ID Analytic Description
DET0578 Detection Strategy for Cloud Storage Object Discovery AN1594

Detection of suspicious enumeration of cloud storage objects via API calls such as AWS S3 ListObjectsV2, Azure List Blobs, or GCP ListObjects. Correlate access with account role, user context, and prior authentication activity to identify anomalous usage patterns (e.g., unusual account, unexpected regions, or large-scale enumeration in short time windows).

References