Applied Cybernetics Group
T1580 Cloud Infrastructure Discovery
- Technique
T1580- Tactics
- Discovery
- Research, 90 days
- 1
- KEV CVEs mapped
- 0
- SigmaHQ rules
- 1
- Elastic, Splunk
- 32
- thrunt rules
- 0
- Upstream
- https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1580
MITRE description
An adversary may attempt to discover infrastructure and resources that are available within an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environment. This includes compute service resources such as instances, virtual machines, and snapshots as well as resources of other services including the storage and database services. Cloud providers offer methods such as APIs and commands issued through CLIs to serve information about infrastructure. For example, AWS provides a <code>DescribeInstances</code> API within the Amazon EC2 API that can return information about one or more instances within an account, the <code>ListBuckets</code> API that returns a list of all buckets owned by the authenticated sender of the request, the <code>HeadBucket</code> API to determine a bucket’s existence along with access permissions of the request sender, or the <code>GetPublicAccessBlock</code> API to retrieve access block configuration for a bucket.(Citation: Amazon Describe Instance)(Citation: Amazon Describe Instances API)(Citation: AWS Get Public Access Block)(Citation: AWS Head Bucket) Similarly, GCP's Cloud SDK CLI provides the <code>gcloud compute instances list</code> command to list all Google Compute Engine instances in a project,(Citation: Google Compute Instances) and Azure's CLI command <code>az vm list</code> lists details of virtual machines.(Citation: Microsoft AZ CLI) In addition to API commands, adversaries can utilize open source tools to discover cloud storage infrastructure through [Wordlist Scanning](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1595/003).(Citation: Malwarebytes OSINT Leaky Buckets - Hioureas) An adversary may enumerate resources using a compromised user's access keys to determine which are available to that user.(Citation: Expel IO Evil in AWS) The discovery of these available resources may help adversaries determine their next steps in the Cloud environment, such as establishing Persistence.(Citation: Mandiant M-Trends 2020)An adversary may also use this information to change the configuration to make the bucket publicly accessible, allowing data to be accessed without authentication. Adversaries have also may use infrastructure discovery APIs such as <code>DescribeDBInstances</code> to determine size, owner, permissions, and network ACLs of database resources.(Citation: AWS Describe DB Instances) Adversaries can use this information to determine the potential value of databases and discover the requirements to access them. Unlike in [Cloud Service Discovery](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1526), this technique focuses on the discovery of components of the provided services rather than the services themselves.
Research citing this technique
Reports and advisories from the last 90 days that cite this technique.
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2026-10-21Microsoft Threat Intelligence: AI-driven, large-scale nation-state campaign using ARTEX enables supply chain compromise
Detection coverage
SigmaHQ community rules
Elastic and Splunk rules
- Azure WireServer Unusual Process Connection (elastic)
- Suspicious Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) API Command Line Execution (elastic)
- Suspicious Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) API Request (elastic)
- AWS Control Plane Access by Suspicious Process (elastic)
- Cloud Offensive Framework Execution (elastic)
- AWS EC2 Bulk User Data Enumeration (elastic)
- AWS EC2 Deprecated AMI Discovery (elastic)
- AWS EC2 User Data Retrieval for EC2 Instance (elastic)
- AWS Discovery API Calls via CLI from a Single Resource (elastic)
- AWS Discovery API Calls from VPN ASN for the First Time by Identity (elastic)
- AWS Account Discovery By Rare User (elastic)
- AWS S3 Rapid Bucket Posture API Calls from a Single Principal (elastic)
- AWS Service Quotas Multi-Region GetServiceQuota Requests (elastic)
- AWS SSM Inventory Reconnaissance by Rare User (elastic)
- AWS S3 Bucket Enumeration or Brute Force (elastic)
- Spike in AWS Error Messages (elastic)
- Rare AWS Error Code (elastic)
- Azure Storage Anonymous Blob Access to Unusual Resource (elastic)
- Entra ID Sign-in BloodHound Suite User-Agent Detected (elastic)
- Entra ID Sign-in TeamFiltration User-Agent Detected (elastic)
- Spike in Azure Activity Logs Failed Messages (elastic)
- Rare Azure Activity Logs Event Failures (elastic)
- Spike in GCP Audit Failed Messages (elastic)
- Rare GCP Audit Failure Event Code (elastic)
- Unusual Process Resolving AWS ECS Agent Communication Service Endpoint (elastic)
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