Elastic Security Detection Rules

GKE Creation of a RoleBinding Referencing a ServiceAccount

Last updated 9 days ago on 2026-07-10
Created 9 days ago on 2026-07-10

About

Detects creation of a GKE RoleBinding or ClusterRoleBinding that grants permissions to a ServiceAccount, which may indicate privilege delegation or RBAC misconfiguration leading to elevated access.
Tags
Domain: CloudDomain: KubernetesData Source: GCPData Source: Google Cloud PlatformUse Case: Threat DetectionTactic: PersistenceTactic: Privilege EscalationLanguage: kuery
Severity
medium
Risk Score
47
MITRE ATT&CK™

Persistence (TA0003)(external, opens in a new tab or window)

↳ Account Manipulation (T1098)(external, opens in a new tab or window)

Privilege Escalation (TA0004)(external, opens in a new tab or window)

↳ Account Manipulation (T1098)(external, opens in a new tab or window)

False Positive Examples
GitOps, namespace onboarding, and workload deployment commonly create RoleBindings for service accounts. Default bootstrap bindings from `system:apiserver` and GKE node bootstrap from `gcp:kube-bootstrap` are excluded.
License
Elastic License v2(external, opens in a new tab or window)

Definition

Rule Type
Query (Kibana Query Language)
Integration Pack
Prebuilt Security Detection Rules
Index Patterns
logs-gcp.audit-*
Related Integrations

gcp(external, opens in a new tab or window)

Query
text code block:
data_stream.dataset:gcp.audit and service.name:"k8s.io" and event.outcome:success and
event.action:(
  "io.k8s.authorization.rbac.v1.rolebindings.create" or
  "io.k8s.authorization.rbac.v1.clusterrolebindings.create"
) and gcp.audit.request.subjects.kind:"ServiceAccount" and not client.user.email:(
  "system:apiserver" or
  "gcp:kube-bootstrap"
)

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect GKE Creation of a RoleBinding Referencing a ServiceAccount in the Elastic Security detection engine by installing this rule into your Elastic Stack.

To setup this rule, check out the installation guide for Prebuilt Security Detection Rules(external, opens in a new tab or window).