AWS SES Account Email Sending Enabled

Last updated a month ago on 2026-09-18

Created 2 months ago on 2026-08-24

About

Detects when account-level email sending is explicitly enabled in Amazon SES, via the v1 UpdateAccountSendingEnabled API with Enabled: true or the v2 PutAccountSendingAttributes API with SendingEnabled: true. Account-level sending is commonly paused by an administrator, or by automation wired to CloudWatch reputation alarms when bounce or complaint rates rise. An attacker who compromises an AWS account may re-enable sending to restore a paused capability as part of phishing infrastructure setup, allowing bulk email under the victim organization's trusted sending domain. Neither API can resume sending that AWS itself has paused.

Tags

Domain: CloudData Source: AWSData Source: Amazon Web ServicesPlatform: AWSData Source: AWS CloudTrailService: AWS SESRule Type: Custom Query (KQL)Tactic: Resource DevelopmentLanguage: kuery

Severity

medium

Risk Score

MITRE ATT&CK™

Resource Development (TA0042)(external, opens in a new tab or window)

↳ Stage Capabilities (T1608)(external, opens in a new tab or window)

False Positive Examples

SES account sending may be legitimately re-enabled by an administrator after a sending pause for bounce/complaint rate investigation or maintenance. Validate against a change management record or scheduled maintenance window. This API is rarely called in normal operations.

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: "ses.amazonaws.com"
    and event.action: ("UpdateAccountSendingEnabled" or "PutAccountSendingAttributes")
    and event.outcome: "success"
    and aws.cloudtrail.request_parameters: (*enabled=true* or *Enabled=true*)
    and not user_agent.original: (*Terraform* or *terraform* or *Pulumi* or *pulumi* or *Ansible* or "batch.amazonaws.com" or "cloudformation.amazonaws.com")

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect AWS SES Account Email Sending Enabled 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).