Cross-source coverage
T1580 / ATT&CK
Cloud Infrastructure Discovery
34 rules across 6 sources.
From MITRE ATT&CK 19.2
An adversary may attempt to discover infrastructure and resources that are available within an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environment. This includes compute service resources such as instances, virtual machines, and snapshots as well as resources of other services including the storage and database services.
Cloud providers offer methods such as APIs and commands issued through CLIs to serve information about infrastructure. For example, AWS provides a DescribeInstances API within the Amazon EC2 API that can return information about one or more instances within an account, the ListBuckets API that returns a list of all buckets owned by the authenticated sender of the request, the HeadBucket API to determine a bucket’s existence along with access permissions of the request sender, or the GetPublicAccessBlock API to retrieve access block configuration for a bucket. Similarly, GCP's Cloud SDK CLI provides the gcloud compute instances list command to list all Google Compute Engine instances in a project, and Azure's CLI command az vm list lists details of virtual machines. In addition to API commands, adversaries can utilize open source tools to discover cloud storage infrastructure through Wordlist Scanning.
An adversary may enumerate resources using a compromised user's access keys to determine which are available to that user. The discovery of these available resources may help adversaries determine their next steps in the Cloud environment, such as establishing Persistence.An adversary may also use this information to change the configuration to make the bucket publicly accessible, allowing data to be accessed without authentication. Adversaries have also may use infrastructure discovery APIs such as DescribeDBInstances to determine size, owner, permissions, and network ACLs of database resources. Adversaries can use this information to determine the potential value of databases and discover the requirements to access them. Unlike in Cloud Service Discovery, this technique focuses on the discovery of components of the provided services rather than the services themselves.
- Tactics
- Discovery
- Platforms
- IaaS
- Telemetry
-
AWS:CloudTrail
How MITRE says to detect it DET0169
Detection Strategy for Cloud Infrastructure Discovery
IaaS Analytic 0481
Defenders should monitor for suspicious enumeration of cloud infrastructure components via APIs or CLI tools. Observable behaviors include repeated listing or description operations for compute instances, snapshots, storage buckets, and volumes. From a defender’s perspective, risky activity is often identified by new or untrusted identities making discovery calls (e.g., DescribeInstances, ListBuckets, az vm list, gcloud compute instances list), enumeration from unusual geolocations or IPs, or rapid multi-service discovery in sequence. Correlating discovery API usage with later snapshot creation or instance modification provides further context of adversary behavior.
AWS:CloudTrailDescribeInstancesAWS:CloudTrailListBucketsAWS:CloudTrailDescribeDBInstances
elastic/detection-rules
20 rules| Detection | Severity | Format |
|---|---|---|
| AWS Discovery API Calls from VPN ASN for the First Time by Identity | High | Elastic TOML |
| Entra ID Sign-in BloodHound Suite User-Agent Detected | High | Elastic TOML |
| Entra ID Sign-in TeamFiltration User-Agent Detected | High | Elastic TOML |
| AWS EC2 User Data Retrieval for EC2 Instance | Medium | Elastic TOML |
| AWS SSM Inventory Reconnaissance by Rare User | Medium | Elastic TOML |
| Suspicious Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) API Command Line Execution | Medium | Elastic TOML |
| Suspicious Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) API Request | Medium | Elastic TOML |
| AWS Account Discovery By Rare User | Low | Elastic TOML |
| AWS Discovery API Calls via CLI from a Single Resource | Low | Elastic TOML |
| AWS EC2 Deprecated AMI Discovery | Low | Elastic TOML |
+ 10 more from elastic/detection-rules → showing the 10 highest-severity
splunk/security_content
5 rules| Detection | Severity | Format |
|---|---|---|
| ASL AWS IAM AccessDenied Discovery Events | Undefined | SPL |
| ASL AWS IAM Assume Role Policy Brute Force | Undefined | SPL |
| AWS Bedrock High Number List Foundation Model Failures | Undefined | SPL |
| AWS IAM AccessDenied Discovery Events | Undefined | SPL |
| AWS IAM Assume Role Policy Brute Force | Undefined | SPL |
chronicle/detection-rules
4 rules| Detection | Severity | Format |
|---|---|---|
| aws_ec2_high_number_of_api_calls | Low | YARA-L |
| aws_excessive_successful_discovery_events | Low | YARA-L |
| aws_iam_access_denied_discovery_events | Low | YARA-L |
| gcp_excessive_permission_denied_events | Low | YARA-L |
panther-labs/panther-analysis
3 rules| Detection | Severity | Format |
|---|---|---|
| AWS CloudTrail SES Enumeration | Medium | Panther Python |
| AWS EC2 Download Instance User Data | Medium | Panther Python |
| AWS RDS Snapshot Enumeration with Public or Shared Flag | Low | Panther Python |
SigmaHQ/sigma
1 rule| Detection | Severity | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Potential Bucket Enumeration on AWS | Low | Sigma |
socfortress/Wazuh-Rules
1 rule| Detection | Severity | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Execution of Stratus Red Team EC2 discovery technique (T1580 - Cloud Infrastructure Discovery) | Medium | Wazuh XML |