AWS EKS Sensitive RBAC Change Followed by Workload Modification

Last updated 2 days ago on 2026-10-21
Created 3 months ago on 2026-08-03

About

Detects a sequence where a principal creates or modifies a Role/ClusterRole to include high-risk permissions (e.g., wildcard access or escalation verbs) and then creates or patches a workload resource (DaemonSet, Deployment, or CronJob) shortly after, which may indicate RBAC-based privilege escalation followed by payload deployment. This pattern is often used by adversaries to gain unauthorized access to sensitive resources and deploy malicious payloads.
Tags
Domain: CloudDomain: ContainersPlatform: AWSPlatform: KubernetesData Source: AWSData Source: Amazon Web ServicesData Source: Kubernetes API Server Audit LogsService: AWS EKSUse Case: Threat DetectionTactic: Privilege EscalationTactic: PersistenceRule Type: Event Correlation (EQL)Profile: BetaLanguage: eql
Severity
medium
Risk Score
47
MITRE ATT&CK™

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

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

License
Elastic License v2(external, opens in a new tab or window)

Definition

Rule Type
Event Correlation Rule
Integration Pack
Prebuilt Security Detection Rules
Index Patterns
logs-aws.eks_audit-*
Related Integrations

aws(external, opens in a new tab or window)

Query
text code block:
sequence by orchestrator.cluster.name, user.name with maxspan=5m [any where data_stream.dataset == "aws.eks_audit" and `aws.eks.audit.annotations.authorization_k8s_io/decision` == "allow" and aws.eks.audit.objectRef.resource in ("roles", "clusterroles") and aws.eks.audit.verb in ("create", "update", "patch") and not startsWith(user.name, "eks:")] [any where data_stream.dataset == "aws.eks_audit" and `aws.eks.audit.annotations.authorization_k8s_io/decision` == "allow" and aws.eks.audit.objectRef.resource in ("daemonsets", "deployments", "cronjobs") and aws.eks.audit.verb in ("create", "patch") and /* skip controller status writes and HPA / kubectl scale patches */ not aws.eks.audit.objectRef.subresource in ("status", "scale") and /* reduce control-plane / bootstrap noise */ not aws.eks.audit.user.groups == "system:masters" and not startsWith(user.name, "eks:") ]

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect AWS EKS Sensitive RBAC Change Followed by Workload Modification 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).