Account Discovery: Cloud Account
- ID
- T1087.004
- Tactics
- TA0007 Discovery
- Sub-technique of
- T1087 Account Discovery
- Platforms
- IaaS, Identity Provider, Office Suite, SaaS
- Data sources
- User Account Metadata, User Account Authentication, Command Execution, Application Log Content
- Source
- attack.mitre.org
- MITRE last modified
- 25 Oct 2025
Adversaries may attempt to get a listing of cloud accounts. Cloud accounts are those created and configured by an organization for use by users, remote support, services, or for administration of resources within a cloud service provider or SaaS application.
With authenticated access there are several tools that can be used to find accounts. The Get-MsolRoleMember PowerShell cmdlet can be used to obtain account names given a role or permissions group in Office 365.[1][2] The Azure CLI (AZ CLI) also provides an interface to obtain user accounts with authenticated access to a domain. The command az ad user list will list all users within a domain.[3][4]
The AWS command aws iam list-users may be used to obtain a list of users in the current account while aws iam list-roles can obtain IAM roles that have a specified path prefix.[5][6] In GCP, gcloud iam service-accounts list and gcloud projects get-iam-policy may be used to obtain a listing of service accounts and users in a project.[7]
Detection
- DET0386 Cloud Account Enumeration via API, CLI, and Scripting Interfaces
Data components: User Account Metadata, User Account Authentication, Command Execution, Application Log Content
Mitigations (2)
- M1018 User Account Management
Limit permissions to discover cloud accounts in accordance with least privilege. Organizations should limit the number of users within the organization with an IAM role that has administrative privileges, strive to reduce all permanent privileged role assignments, and conduct periodic entitlement reviews on IAM users, roles and policies.
- M1047 Audit
Routinely check user permissions to ensure only the expected users have the ability to list IAM identities or otherwise discover cloud accounts.