GCP Service Account Deletion

edit

Identifies when a service account is deleted in Google Cloud Platform (GCP). A service account is a special type of account used by an application or a virtual machine (VM) instance, not a person. Applications use service accounts to make authorized API calls, authorized as either the service account itself, or as G Suite or Cloud Identity users through domain-wide delegation. An adversary may delete a service account in order to disrupt their target’s business operations.

Rule type: query

Rule indices:

  • filebeat-*
  • logs-gcp*

Severity: medium

Risk score: 47

Runs every: 5 minutes

Searches indices from: now-6m (Date Math format, see also Additional look-back time)

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

References:

Tags:

  • Elastic
  • Cloud
  • GCP
  • Continuous Monitoring
  • SecOps
  • Identity and Access

Version: 3 (version history)

Added (Elastic Stack release): 7.10.0

Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 7.11.2

Rule authors: Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License

Potential false positives

edit

Service accounts may be deleted by system administrators. Verify that the behavior was expected. Exceptions can be added to this rule to filter expected behavior.

Investigation guide

edit

The GCP Filebeat module must be enabled to use this rule.

Rule query

edit
event.dataset:(googlecloud.audit or gcp.audit) and
event.action:google.iam.admin.v*.DeleteServiceAccount and
event.outcome:success

Threat mapping

edit

Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM

Rule version history

edit
Version 3 (7.11.2 release)
  • Formatting only
Version 2 (7.11.0 release)
  • Updated query, changed from:

    event.dataset:googlecloud.audit and
    event.action:google.iam.admin.v*.DeleteServiceAccount and
    event.outcome:success