platform or security teams may legitimately associate these policies during cluster onboarding, break-glass admin setup, or controlled rbac migrations from aws-auth. validate the caller, change ticket, and target iam principal.

Techniques

T1098

Sample rules

AWS EKS Access Entry Granted Cluster Admin Policy

source: elastic
technicques:
- T1098

Description

Detects when the AmazonEKSClusterAdminPolicy or AmazonEKSAdminPolicy is associated with a principal via the EKS Access Entries API. This grants full cluster-admin equivalent access to the specified IAM user or role. Unlike the legacy aws-auth ConfigMap which is only visible in Kubernetes audit logs, Access Entries modifications appear in CloudTrail, providing an additional detection surface. Attackers who have obtained IAM permissions to manage EKS access entries can use this API to backdoor cluster access for persistence, mapping attacker-controlled IAM identities to cluster-admin privileges without modifying any Kubernetes resources.

Detection logic

data_stream.dataset:"aws.cloudtrail" and
event.provider:"eks.amazonaws.com" and
event.action:"AssociateAccessPolicy" and
event.outcome:"success" and
aws.cloudtrail.request_parameters:(*AmazonEKSClusterAdminPolicy* or *AmazonEKSAdminPolicy*)