Persistence: Sensitive Role Granted to External AI Agent

This document describes a threat finding type in Security Command Center. Threat findings are generated by threat detectors when they detect a potential threat in your cloud resources. For a full list of available threat findings, see Threat findings index.

Overview

An AI agent from an external organization was granted a sensitive IAM role. Findings are classified as Medium severity for medium-sensitivity roles, or High severity for high-sensitivity roles. For more information, see Sensitive IAM roles and permissions for AI.

Event Threat Detection is the source of this finding.

How to respond

To respond to this finding, do the following:

Step 1: Review finding details

  1. Open the Persistence: Sensitive Role Granted to External AI Agent finding as directed in Reviewing findings. The details panel for the finding opens to the Summary tab.

  2. On the Summary tab, review the information in the following sections:

    • What was detected, especially the following fields:
      • Principal email: email address for the user or service account that assigned the role.
      • Offending access grants: details of the sensitive roles that were added.

    • Affected resource

    • Related links, especially the following fields:

      • Cloud Logging URI: link to Logging entries.
      • MITRE ATT&CK method: link to the MITRE ATT&CK documentation.

Step 2: Check logs

  1. On the Summary tab of the finding details panel, click the Cloud Logging URI link to open the Logs Explorer.
  2. On the page that loads, look for new or updated IAM resources using the following filters:
    • protoPayload.methodName="SetIamPolicy"

Step 3: Research attack and response methods

  1. Review MITRE ATT&CK framework entries for this finding type: Valid Accounts: Cloud Accounts.
  2. To develop a response plan, combine your investigation results with MITRE research.

Step 4: Implement your response

The following response plan might be appropriate for this finding, but might also impact operations. Carefully evaluate the information you gather in your investigation to determine the best way to resolve findings.

  • Contact the owner of the project with the compromised account.
  • Delete the compromised service account and rotate and delete all service account access keys for the compromised project. After deletion, resources that use the service account for authentication lose access.
  • Delete project resources created by unauthorized accounts, like unfamiliar Compute Engine instances, snapshots, service accounts, and IAM users.
  • To restrict adding external users, use the Organization Policy.

What's next