VIEW RULE IN DATADOG VIEW IDENTITY RISKS

Description

In AWS environments, some IAM permissions can lead to privilege escalation, where an identity can gain access to another more privileged identity. This rule identifies when a given role can use iam:UpdateLoginProfile to modify an existing login profile for an IAM user with administrative privileges. By creating a new login profile for another user, an adversary could log in as that user and leverage their privileges.

Rationale

In this scenario, there exists at least one privileged IAM user in the account who has a login profile set. The identity which triggered this detection can modify a login profile for that IAM user, giving them access to the privileges of the compromised user.

Remediation

Datadog recommends reducing the permissions attached to an IAM role to the minimum necessary for the role to fulfill its function. To remediate the issue, either remove the iam:UpdateLoginProfile permission entirely or modify the resource the IAM policy specifies.