Azure Privilege Escalation Using an Application

Synopsis

Field	Value
Activation Period	14 Days
Training Period	30 Days
Test Period	5 Hours
Deduplication Period	1 Day
Required Data	Requires all of the following: AzureAD Audit Log Microsoft Graph Logs Office 365 Audit Okta Palo Alto Networks Global Protect OR Third-Party VPNs XDR Agent XDR Agent with eXtended Threat Hunting (XTH)
Detection Modules	Identity Threat Module
ATT&CK Tactic	Privilege Escalation (TA0004)
ATT&CK Technique	Abuse Elevation Control Mechanism (T1548)
Severity	Medium

Description

An Azure application was observed assigning an Azure administrator role to a user. This might indicate a privilege escalation attempt.

Attacker's Goals

• An attacker may add additional roles or permissions to an attacker controlled cloud account to maintain persistent access to a tenant.

Investigative actions

• Check if the affected account is new to the organization.
• Check whether the application that added the account to the role is permitted to perform such actions.
• Check what can be affected by the assigned role* Follow further actions done by the account that was added to the role.