AWS CloudTrail Log Evasion

Last updated 14 days ago on 2025-06-10
Created 14 days ago on 2025-06-10

About

Identifies the evasion of cloudtrail logging for IAM actions involving policy creation, modification or attachment. When making certain policy-related API calls, an adversary may pad the associated policy document with whitespaces to trigger CloudTrail’s logging size constraints, resulting in incomplete logging where critical details about the policy are omitted. By exploiting this gap, threat actors can bypass monitoring performed through CloudTrail and can effectively obscure unauthorized changes. This rule looks for IAM API calls with the requestParameters property containing reason:”requestParameters too large” and omitted:true.
Tags
Domain: CloudData Source: AWSData Source: Amazon Web ServicesData Source: AWS IAMUse Case: Log AuditingTactic: Defense EvasionLanguage: kuery
Severity
medium
Risk Score
47
MITRE ATT&CK™

Defense Evasion (TA0005)(opens in a new tab or window)

False Positive Examples
There is no known legitimate reason for padding policies with white spaces to the extent it would take to trigger Cloudtrail's logging constraints. Any instance of this should be investigated.
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 aws.cloudtrail.flattened.request_parameters.reason: "requestParameters too large" and aws.cloudtrail.flattened.request_parameters.omitted : true and event.outcome: success

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect AWS CloudTrail Log Evasion 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).