- Tactics
- Credential Access
- Platforms
- IaaS
- Reference
- attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1555.006
Description
Adversaries may acquire credentials from cloud-native secret management solutions such as AWS Secrets Manager, GCP Secret Manager, Azure Key Vault, and Terraform Vault.
Secrets managers support the secure centralized management of passwords, API keys, and other credential material. Where secrets managers are in use, cloud services can dynamically acquire credentials via API requests rather than accessing secrets insecurely stored in plain text files or environment variables.
If an adversary is able to gain sufficient privileges in a cloud environment – for example, by obtaining the credentials of high-privileged Cloud Accounts or compromising a service that has permission to retrieve secrets – they may be able to request secrets from the secrets manager. This can be accomplished via commands such as get-secret-value in AWS, gcloud secrets describe in GCP, and az key vault secret show in Azure.(Citation: Permiso Scattered Spider 2023)(Citation: Sysdig ScarletEel 2.0 2023)(Citation: AWS Secrets Manager)(Citation: Google Cloud Secrets)(Citation: Microsoft Azure Key Vault)
Note: this technique is distinct from Cloud Instance Metadata API in that the credentials are being directly requested from the cloud secrets manager, rather than through the medium of the instance metadata API.
How GTK Cyber trains on this
GTK Cyber's Threat Hunting with Data Science course teaches you to build machine-learning detections for techniques like this across the MITRE ATT&CK framework, including the Credential Access tactic this technique falls under. Practitioner-led, focused on real detections, not memorizing technique IDs.
Related techniques
- T1003 — OS Credential Dumping
- T1040 — Network Sniffing
- T1056 — Input Capture
- T1110 — Brute Force
- T1111 — Multi-Factor Authentication Interception
- T1187 — Forced Authentication
- T1212 — Exploitation for Credential Access
- T1528 — Steal Application Access Token
- T1539 — Steal Web Session Cookie
- T1552 — Unsecured Credentials
- T1555 — Credentials from Password Stores
- T1556 — Modify Authentication Process