ses account sending may be legitimately re-enabled by an administrator after a sending pause for bounce/complaint rate investigation or maintenance. validate against a change management record or scheduled maintenance window. this api is rarely called in normal operations.

Techniques

T1608

Sample rules

AWS SES Account Email Sending Enabled

source: elastic
technicques:
- T1608

Description

Detects when account-level email sending is explicitly enabled in Amazon SES, via the v1 UpdateAccountSendingEnabled API with Enabled: true or the v2 PutAccountSendingAttributes API with SendingEnabled: true. Account-level sending is commonly paused by an administrator, or by automation wired to CloudWatch reputation alarms when bounce or complaint rates rise. An attacker who compromises an AWS account may re-enable sending to restore a paused capability as part of phishing infrastructure setup, allowing bulk email under the victim organization’s trusted sending domain. Neither API can resume sending that AWS itself has paused.

Detection logic

data_stream.dataset: "aws.cloudtrail"
    and event.provider: "ses.amazonaws.com"
    and event.action: ("UpdateAccountSendingEnabled" or "PutAccountSendingAttributes")
    and event.outcome: "success"
    and aws.cloudtrail.request_parameters: (*enabled=true* or *Enabled=true*)
    and not user_agent.original: (*Terraform* or *terraform* or *Pulumi* or *pulumi* or *Ansible* or "batch.amazonaws.com" or "cloudformation.amazonaws.com")