Elastic Security Detection Rules

AWS IAM Group Deletion

Last updated 19 days ago on 2025-10-30
Created 5 years ago on 2020-05-21

About

Detects when an IAM group is deleted using the DeleteGroup API call. Deletion of an IAM group may represent a malicious attempt to remove audit trails, disrupt operations, or hide adversary activity (for example after using the group briefly for privileged access). This can be an indicator of impact or cleanup in an attack lifecycle.
Tags
Domain: CloudData Source: AWSData Source: Amazon Web ServicesData Source: AWS IAMTactic: ImpactLanguage: kuery
Severity
low
Risk Score
21
MITRE ATT&CK™

Impact (TA0040)(opens in a new tab or window)

↳ Account Access Removal (T1531)(opens in a new tab or window)

False Positive Examples
Legitimate group deletion during decommissioning of projects, clean-up of service accounts, or identity lifecycle changes may trigger this alert. Verify whether the user identity, user agent, and/or hostname should be making changes in your environment. Resource group deletions by unfamiliar users or hosts should be investigated. If known behavior is causing false positives, it can be exempted from the rule.
License
Elastic License v2(opens in a new tab or window)

Definition

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

aws(opens in a new tab or window)

Query
event.dataset: aws.cloudtrail and 
    event.provider: iam.amazonaws.com and 
    event.action: DeleteGroup and 
    event.outcome: success

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect AWS IAM Group Deletion 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(opens in a new tab or window).