Most Security Teams Lack Detection Rules for Cloud IAM Attacks, Experts Warn
Security teams with mature endpoint detection capabilities are often blind to cloud-native attacks because their rules assume a process tree exists, which IAM-based attacks do not have. A stolen AWS access key can enable full account reconnaissance through a burst of IAM API calls that leave no trace in EDR or host-based tools, only in CloudTrail logs. Attackers can escalate privileges by chaining legitimate permissions such as iam:PassRole with lambda:CreateFunction and lambda:InvokeFunction, a well-documented AWS escalation path that triggers no traditional alerts. Experts say effective cloud detection requires understanding normal API behavior per identity and flagging unusual permission combinations across providers including Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes. The same detection engineering discipline used for host and network threats can be applied to audit logs, but that translation must be deliberately built rather than assumed.
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