AWS Organizations Delegated Administrator Registered

Last updated a month ago on 2026-09-18

Created 2 months ago on 2026-08-24

About

Detects when an AWS member account is registered as a delegated administrator for an AWS service via the RegisterDelegatedAdministrator API. Delegated administrators receive service-level administrative access across the entire organization without being the management account. An attacker who compromises a principal with organizations permissions can abuse overly permissive managed policies to register a member account they control as a delegated administrator, then use that privileged access to escalate privileges organization-wide and compromise all member accounts.

Tags

Domain: CloudData Source: AWSData Source: Amazon Web ServicesPlatform: AWSData Source: AWS CloudTrailService: AWS OrganizationsRule Type: Custom Query (KQL)Tactic: PersistenceTactic: Privilege EscalationLanguage: kuery

Severity

medium

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)

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

↳ Domain or Tenant Policy Modification (T1484)(external, opens in a new tab or window)

False Positive Examples

Legitimate cloud platform operations — enabling Security Hub, GuardDuty, or other AWS services at the organization level — require registering a delegated administrator. Validate the called service and target account against your organization's approved delegated admin configuration and a corresponding change management record.

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-aws.cloudtrail-*
Related Integrations: aws(external, opens in a new tab or window)
Query

✄𐘗text code block:
✄𐘗data_stream.dataset: "aws.cloudtrail"
    and event.provider: "organizations.amazonaws.com"
    and event.action: "RegisterDelegatedAdministrator"
    and event.outcome: "success"

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect AWS Organizations Delegated Administrator Registered 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).