splunk_escuHunting

ASL AWS IAM Delete Policy

The following analytic identifies when a policy is deleted in AWS. It leverages Amazon Security Lake logs to detect the DeletePolicy API operation. Monitoring policy deletions is crucial as it can indicate unauthorized attempts to weaken security controls. If confirmed malicious, this activity could allow an attacker to remove critical security policies, potentially leading to privilege escalation or unauthorized access to sensitive resources.

MITRE ATT&CK

T1098

Detection Query

`amazon_security_lake` api.operation=DeletePolicy
  | fillnull
  | stats count min(_time) as firstTime max(_time) as lastTime
    BY actor.user.uid api.operation api.service.name
       http_request.user_agent src_endpoint.ip actor.user.account.uid
       cloud.provider cloud.region
  | rename actor.user.uid as user api.operation as action api.service.name as dest http_request.user_agent as user_agent src_endpoint.ip as src actor.user.account.uid as vendor_account cloud.provider as vendor_product cloud.region as vendor_region
  | `security_content_ctime(firstTime)`
  | `security_content_ctime(lastTime)`
  | `asl_aws_iam_delete_policy_filter`

Author

Patrick Bareiss, Splunk

Created

2026-02-25

Data Sources

ASL AWS CloudTrail

References

Tags

AWS IAM Privilege Escalation

Raw Content

name: ASL AWS IAM Delete Policy
id: 609ced68-d420-4ff7-8164-ae98b4b4018c
version: 8
date: '2026-02-25'
author: Patrick Bareiss, Splunk
status: production
type: Hunting
description: The following analytic identifies when a policy is deleted in AWS. It leverages Amazon Security Lake logs to detect the DeletePolicy API operation. Monitoring policy deletions is crucial as it can indicate unauthorized attempts to weaken security controls. If confirmed malicious, this activity could allow an attacker to remove critical security policies, potentially leading to privilege escalation or unauthorized access to sensitive resources.
data_source:
    - ASL AWS CloudTrail
search: |-
    `amazon_security_lake` api.operation=DeletePolicy
      | fillnull
      | stats count min(_time) as firstTime max(_time) as lastTime
        BY actor.user.uid api.operation api.service.name
           http_request.user_agent src_endpoint.ip actor.user.account.uid
           cloud.provider cloud.region
      | rename actor.user.uid as user api.operation as action api.service.name as dest http_request.user_agent as user_agent src_endpoint.ip as src actor.user.account.uid as vendor_account cloud.provider as vendor_product cloud.region as vendor_region
      | `security_content_ctime(firstTime)`
      | `security_content_ctime(lastTime)`
      | `asl_aws_iam_delete_policy_filter`
how_to_implement: The detection is based on Amazon Security Lake events from Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is a centralized data lake that provides security-related data from AWS services. To use this detection, you must ingest CloudTrail logs from Amazon Security Lake into Splunk. To run this search, ensure that you ingest events using the latest version of Splunk Add-on for Amazon Web Services (https://splunkbase.splunk.com/app/1876) or the Federated Analytics App.
known_false_positives: This detection will require tuning to provide high fidelity detection capabilties. Tune based on src addresses (corporate offices, VPN terminations) or by groups of users. Not every user with AWS access should have permission to delete policies (least privilege). In addition, this may be saved seperately and tuned for failed or success attempts only.
references:
    - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/APIReference/API_DeletePolicy.html
    - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/iam/delete-policy.html
tags:
    analytic_story:
        - AWS IAM Privilege Escalation
    asset_type: AWS Account
    mitre_attack_id:
        - T1098
    product:
        - Splunk Enterprise
        - Splunk Enterprise Security
        - Splunk Cloud
    security_domain: access
tests:
    - name: True Positive Test
      attack_data:
        - data: https://media.githubusercontent.com/media/splunk/attack_data/master/datasets/attack_techniques/T1098/aws_iam_delete_policy/asl_ocsf_cloudtrail.json
          sourcetype: aws:asl
          source: aws_asl