T1555.006

Cloud Secrets Management Stores

Adversaries may acquire credentials from cloud-native secret management solutions such as AWS Secrets Manager, GCP Secret Manager, Azure Key Vault, and Terraform Vault. Secrets managers support the secure centralized management of passwords, API keys, and other credential material. If an adversary gains sufficient privileges in a cloud environment, they may request secrets via API calls such as get-secret-value (AWS), gcloud secrets describe (GCP), and az key vault secret show (Azure). This technique has been used by HAFNIUM, Storm-0501, Scattered Spider, and ScarletEel.

Microsoft Sentinel / Defender
kusto
let AWSSecretOps = dynamic(["GetSecretValue", "ListSecrets", "DescribeSecret", "BatchGetSecretValue"]);
let AzureSecretOps = dynamic(["SecretGet", "SecretList", "Microsoft.KeyVault/vaults/secrets/read", "Microsoft.KeyVault/vaults/secrets/getSecret"]);
let GCPSecretOps = dynamic(["google.cloud.secretmanager.v1.SecretManagerService.AccessSecretVersion", "google.cloud.secretmanager.v1.SecretManagerService.ListSecrets"]);
CloudAppEvents
| where Timestamp > ago(24h)
| where ActionType has_any (AWSSecretOps) or ActionType has_any (AzureSecretOps) or ActionType has_any (GCPSecretOps)
| summarize SecretAccessCount=count(), UniqueSecrets=dcount(tostring(RawEventData.requestParameters.secretId)),
            FirstAccess=min(Timestamp), LastAccess=max(Timestamp)
            by AccountDisplayName, IPAddress, Application
| where SecretAccessCount > 10 or UniqueSecrets > 5
| sort by SecretAccessCount desc
critical severity medium confidence

Data Sources

Cloud Service: Cloud Service Enumeration Application Log: Application Log Content AWS CloudTrail Azure Activity Log GCP Audit Log

Required Tables

CloudAppEvents

False Positives

  • CI/CD pipelines that retrieve multiple secrets during deployment operations
  • Application startup routines that batch-load configuration secrets from the secrets manager
  • Secrets rotation automation that accesses all secrets during scheduled rotation cycles
  • Infrastructure-as-Code tools (Terraform, Pulumi) that read secrets during plan/apply operations

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