Detect Unused/Unsupported Cloud Regions in IBM QRadar
Adversaries may create cloud instances in unused geographic service regions in order to evade detection. Access is usually obtained through compromising accounts used to manage cloud infrastructure. Cloud service providers provide infrastructure globally, but organizations typically monitor only a subset of available regions and may not have security tooling (GuardDuty, Security Hub, Defender for Cloud) enabled in every region. Resources created in unmonitored or lightly-monitored regions may go undetected, enabling adversaries to conduct cryptocurrency mining, command-and-control staging, data exfiltration, and lateral movement without triggering alerts configured for primary regions. A notable variation exploits regional gaps in security service coverage — certain AWS regions may lack GuardDuty enrollment, CloudTrail data events, or Security Hub aggregation by default.
MITRE ATT&CK
- Tactic
- Defense Evasion
- Technique
- T1535 Unused/Unsupported Cloud Regions
- Canonical reference
- https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1535/
QRadar Detection Query
SELECT
DATEFORMAT(starttime/1000, 'yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss') AS EventTime,
sourceip AS SourceIP,
username AS Actor,
QIDNAME(qid) AS EventAction,
"AWS Region" AS CloudRegion,
"Account ID" AS AccountId,
"User Identity Type" AS ActorType,
"User Identity ARN" AS ActorARN,
LOGSOURCENAME(logsourceid) AS LogSource
FROM events
WHERE
LOGSOURCETYPENAME(devicetype) ILIKE '%Amazon AWS CloudTrail%'
AND QIDNAME(qid) IN (
'RunInstances', 'CreateBucket', 'CreateCluster', 'CreateFunction',
'CreateDBInstance', 'CreateDBCluster', 'CreateVolume', 'CreateVpc',
'CreateUser', 'CreateAccessKey', 'CreateRole', 'CreateSecret',
'CreateKey', 'CreateStackInstances'
)
AND ("Error Code" IS NULL OR "Error Code" = '')
AND "AWS Region" NOT IN (
'us-east-1', 'us-west-2', 'eu-west-1', 'eu-central-1'
)
AND "AWS Region" IS NOT NULL
AND starttime > NOW() - 86400000
ORDER BY starttime DESC
LIMIT 1000Detects AWS CloudTrail resource creation events originating from regions outside the approved list, querying QRadar's normalized events table via the Amazon AWS CloudTrail DSM. The fields 'AWS Region', 'Account ID', 'User Identity Type', and 'User Identity ARN' are Custom Event Properties (CEPs) created by the CloudTrail DSM parser — verify these property names match your QRadar deployment using the Log Activity viewer. Extend with Azure Activity Log DSM entries using a UNION or separate rule targeting LOGSOURCETYPENAME ILIKE '%Microsoft Azure%' with equivalent operation name filters.
Data Sources
Required Tables
False Positives & Tuning
- Cloud automation pipelines (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi) provisioning resources during infrastructure-as-code deployments that span regions not yet added to the approved list.
- Engineering teams running performance or latency benchmarks in alternate regions during pre-production testing phases.
- Mergers and acquisitions where the acquired entity's cloud footprint spans regions outside the parent organization's monitored set — these will fire until the approved region list is updated.
Other platforms for T1535
Testing Methodology
Validate this detection against 4 adversary techniques from Atomic Red Team. Each test below lists the behaviour to exercise and the telemetry you should expect to see. Executable commands and cleanup steps are available with Pro.
- Test 1AWS EC2 Instance Launch in Unused Region
Expected signal: AWS CloudTrail EventName=RunInstances in region ap-southeast-1. UserIdentityArn shows the calling principal. RequestParameters will include imageId, instanceType, and maxCount. This event appears in both regional CloudTrail (if enabled in ap-southeast-1) and the global management events endpoint in us-east-1.
- Test 2AWS S3 Bucket Creation in Unused Region
Expected signal: AWS CloudTrail EventName=CreateBucket in region sa-east-1. The requestParameters field includes the bucket name and LocationConstraint. This event is captured in CloudTrail management events regardless of whether regional CloudTrail is enabled in sa-east-1.
- Test 3AWS IAM Access Key Creation via Unused Region API Endpoint
Expected signal: AWS CloudTrail EventName=CreateUser and EventName=CreateAccessKey. UserIdentityArn shows the calling principal. Even though IAM is global, these events should be correlated with the unusual region activity detected in other tests — a pattern of unusual region compute creation followed by IAM key creation is a high-confidence compromise indicator.
- Test 4Azure Resource Group Creation in Unused Region
Expected signal: Azure Activity Log OperationNameValue=Microsoft.Resources/resourceGroups/write with ActivityStatusValue=Succeeded. The Caller field shows the authenticated principal's UPN or service principal ID. CallerIpAddress records the source IP. Properties contains the location field 'japaneast' which the KQL extraction regex will parse.
References (8)
- https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1535/
- https://medium.com/cloudsploit/the-danger-of-unused-aws-regions-af0bf1b878fc
- https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awscloudtrail/latest/userguide/cloudtrail-concepts.html
- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/essentials/activity-log
- https://docs.aws.amazon.com/guardduty/latest/ug/guardduty_regions.html
- https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/orgs_manage_policies_scps.html
- https://github.com/redcanaryco/atomic-red-team/blob/master/atomics/T1535/T1535.md
- https://rhinosecuritylabs.com/aws/aws-privilege-escalation-methods-mitigation/
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