Detection coverage in DCV across AWS, Azure and GCP for Valid Accounts, plus the corresponding Sigma rules in the CloudSigma library. Source data refreshed 2026-04-24.
Adversaries may obtain and abuse credentials of existing accounts as a means of gaining Initial Access, Persistence, Privilege Escalation, or Defense Evasion. Compromised credentials may be used to bypass access controls placed on various resources on systems within the network and may even be used for persistent access to remote systems and externally available services, such as VPNs, Outlook Web Access, network devices, and remote desktop. Compromised credentials may also grant an adversary increased privilege to specific systems or access to restricted areas of the network. Adversaries may choose not to use malware or tools in conjunction with the legitimate access those credentials provide to make it harder to detect their presence.
In some cases, adversaries may abuse inactive accounts: for example, those belonging to individuals who are no longer part of an organization. Using these accounts may allow the adversary to evade detection, as the original account user will not be present to identify any anomalous activity taking place on their account.
The overlap of permissions for local, domain, and cloud accounts across a network of systems is of concern because the adversary may be able to pivot across accounts and systems to reach a high level of access (i.e., domain or enterprise administrator) to bypass access controls set within the enterprise.
Platforms: Containers, ESXi, IaaS, Identity Provider, Linux, macOS, Network Devices, Office Suite, SaaS, Windows.
DCV maps 60 detections across 2 cloud providers to T1078. Coverage by source:
| Source | Cloud | Findings mapped | Avg confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS Security Hub | AWS | 34 | 0.84 |
| AWS GuardDuty | AWS | 25 | 0.86 |
| GCP Chronicle | GCP | 1 | 0.85 |
CloudSigma ships 9 production-ready Sigma rules that detect T1078 across 9 platforms. Every rule below is validated against its source SIEM dialect before publication.
High-fidelity detection of T1078 requires correlation
across multiple events. For example, a credential-validation call
followed by a reconnaissance chain (List* /
Describe*) within a short window from an unfamiliar
source. A single-event Sigma rule on
GetCallerIdentity alone fires constantly on
legitimate CLI, SDK and CI/CD activity.
Where you have a specific advisory, vulnerability disclosure or blog post that exercises T1078-style abuse, CloudSigma can generate a starting-point rule from that input. You then deploy it in your SIEM and combine it with the SIEM's native correlation features (timeframe joins across users, source-IP anomalies, impossible-travel checks). For T1078 specifically the generated rule is rarely sufficient on its own; pair it with the SIEM-side correlation logic before enabling in production.