Remote Services: Cloud Services
- ID
- T1021.007
- Tactics
- TA0008 Lateral Movement
- Sub-technique of
- T1021 Remote Services
- Platforms
- IaaS, Identity Provider, Office Suite, SaaS
- Data sources
- Logon Session Creation, Command Execution, File Access
- Source
- attack.mitre.org
- MITRE last modified
- 16 Apr 2025
Adversaries may log into accessible cloud services within a compromised environment using Valid Accounts that are synchronized with or federated to on-premises user identities. The adversary may then perform management actions or access cloud-hosted resources as the logged-on user.
Many enterprises federate centrally managed user identities to cloud services, allowing users to login with their domain credentials in order to access the cloud control plane. Similarly, adversaries may connect to available cloud services through the web console or through the cloud command line interface (CLI) (e.g., Cloud API), using commands such as Connect-AZAccount for Azure PowerShell, Connect-MgGraph for Microsoft Graph PowerShell, and gcloud auth login for the Google Cloud CLI.
In some cases, adversaries may be able to authenticate to these services via Application Access Token instead of a username and password.
Detection
- DET0008 Behavioral Detection of Remote Cloud Logins via Valid Accounts
Data components: Logon Session Creation, Command Execution, File Access
Mitigations (2)
- M1026 Privileged Account Management
Limit the number of high-privileged domain and cloud accounts, and ensure that these are not used for day-to-day operations. Ensure that on-premises accounts do not have privileged cloud permissions and that isolated, cloud-only accounts are used for managing cloud environments.[1]
- M1032 Multi-factor Authentication
Use multi-factor authentication on cloud services whenever possible.
Groups (3)
Software (1)
References
- Protecting Microsoft 365 From On-Premises Attacks