azure_active_directory_privilege_escalation.yml

name: Azure Active Directory Privilege Escalation
id: ec78e872-b79c-417d-b256-8fde902522fb
version: 1
date: '2023-04-24'
author: Mauricio Velazco, Splunk
description: Monitor for activities and techniques associated with Privilege Escalation
  attacks within Azure Active Directory tenants.
narrative: Privilege Escalation consists of techniques that adversaries use to gain higher-level permissions on a system or network. 
  Adversaries can often enter and explore a network with unprivileged access but require elevated permissions to follow through on their objectives. 
  Common approaches are to take advantage of system weaknesses, misconfigurations or vulnerabilities.

  Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) is Microsofts enterprise cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) service. Azure AD is the backbone of most of Azure
  services like Office 365 and Microsoft Teams. It can sync with on-premise Active Directory environments and provide authentication to other cloud-based systems via the OAuth protocol. 
  According to Microsoft, Azure AD manages more than 1.2 billion identities and processes over 8 billion authentications per day.

  Privilege escalation attacks in Azure AD typically involve abusing  misconfigurations to gain elevated privileges,
  such as Global Administrator access. Once an attacker has escalated their privileges and taken full control of a tenant, they may abuse every service that leverages Azure AD including
  moving laterally to Azure virtual machines to access sensitive data and carry out further attacks. Security teams should monitor for 
  privilege escalation attacks in Azure Active Directory to identify breaches before attackers achieve operational success.
   
  The following analytic story groups detection opportunities that seek to identify an adversary attempting to escalate privileges in Azure AD tenants.
references:
- https://attack.mitre.org/tactics/TA0003/
- https://cloudbrothers.info/en/azure-attack-paths/
- https://microsoft.github.io/Azure-Threat-Research-Matrix/PrivilegeEscalation/PrivEsc/
- https://posts.specterops.io/azure-privilege-escalation-via-service-principal-abuse-210ae2be2a5
tags:
  category:
  - Adversary Tactics
  - Account Compromise
  - Cloud Security
  - Privilege Escalation
  product:
  - Splunk Enterprise
  - Splunk Enterprise Security
  - Splunk Cloud
  usecase: Security Monitoring