Google Workspace Admin Role Assigned to a User

Last updated a year ago on 2024-09-23

Created 5 years ago on 2020-11-17

About

Assigning the administrative role to a user will grant them access to the Google Admin console and grant them administrator privileges which allow them to access and manage various resources and applications. An adversary may create a new administrator account for persistence or apply the admin role to an existing user to carry out further intrusion efforts. Users with super-admin privileges can bypass single-sign on if enabled in Google Workspace.

Tags

Domain: CloudData Source: Google WorkspaceUse Case: Identity and Access AuditTactic: PersistenceLanguage: kuery

Severity

high

Risk Score

MITRE ATT&CK™

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

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

False Positive Examples

Google Workspace admin role assignments may be modified by system administrators. Verify that the configuration change was expected. Exceptions can be added to this rule to filter expected behavior.

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: filebeat-*logs-google_workspace*
Related Integrations: google_workspace(external, opens in a new tab or window)
Query

✄𐘗text code block:
✄𐘗event.dataset:"google_workspace.admin" and event.category:"iam" and event.action:"ASSIGN_ROLE"
  and google_workspace.event.type:"DELEGATED_ADMIN_SETTINGS" and google_workspace.admin.role.name : *_ADMIN_ROLE

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect Google Workspace Admin Role Assigned to a User 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).