Account Manipulation: Additional Cloud Roles

An adversary may add additional roles or permissions to an adversary-controlled cloud account to maintain persistent access to a tenant. For example, they may update IAM policies in cloud-based environments or add a new global administrator in Office 365 environments.^[1][2][3][4] With sufficient permissions, a compromised account can gain almost unlimited access to data and settings (including the ability to reset the passwords of other admins).^[5][4]

This account modification may immediately follow Create Account or other malicious account activity. Adversaries may also modify an existing Valid Accounts that they have compromised. This could lead to privilege escalation, particularly if the roles added allow for lateral movement to additional accounts. For example, in Azure AD environments, an adversary with the Application Administrator role can add Additional Cloud Credentials to their application's service principal. In doing so the adversary would be able to gain the service principal’s roles and permissions, which may be different from those of the Application Administrator.^[6]