Detection: Cloud Compute Instance Created With Previously Unseen Instance Type

EXPERIMENTAL DETECTION

This detection status is set to experimental. The Splunk Threat Research team has not yet fully tested, simulated, or built comprehensive datasets for this detection. As such, this analytic is not officially supported. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to us at research@splunk.com.

Updated Date: 2024-05-14 ID: c6ddbf53-9715-49f3-bb4c-fb2e8a309cda Author: David Dorsey, Splunk Type: Anomaly Product: Splunk Enterprise Security

Description

The following analytic detects the creation of EC2 instances with previously unseen instance types. It leverages Splunk's tstats command to analyze data from the Change data model, identifying instance types that have not been previously recorded. This activity is significant for a SOC because it may indicate unauthorized or suspicious activity, such as an attacker attempting to create instances for malicious purposes. If confirmed malicious, this could lead to unauthorized access, data exfiltration, system compromise, or service disruption. Immediate investigation is required to determine the legitimacy of the instance creation.

Search

 1
 2| tstats earliest(_time) as firstTime, latest(_time) as lastTime values(All_Changes.object_id) as dest, count from datamodel=Change where All_Changes.action=created by All_Changes.Instance_Changes.instance_type, All_Changes.user 
 3| `drop_dm_object_name("All_Changes")` 
 4| `drop_dm_object_name("Instance_Changes")` 
 5| where instance_type != "unknown" 
 6| lookup previously_seen_cloud_compute_instance_types instance_type as instance_type OUTPUTNEW firstTimeSeen, enough_data 
 7| eventstats max(enough_data) as enough_data 
 8| where enough_data=1 
 9| eval firstTimeSeenInstanceType=min(firstTimeSeen) 
10| where isnull(firstTimeSeenInstanceType) OR firstTimeSeenInstanceType > relative_time(now(), "-24h@h") 
11| table firstTime, user, dest, count, instance_type 
12| `security_content_ctime(firstTime)` 
13| `cloud_compute_instance_created_with_previously_unseen_instance_type_filter`

Data Source

Name	Platform	Sourcetype	Source	Supported App
AWS CloudTrail	AWS	`'aws:cloudtrail'`	`'aws_cloudtrail'`	N/A

Macros Used

Name	Value
security_content_ctime	`convert timeformat="%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S" ctime($field$)`
cloud_compute_instance_created_with_previously_unseen_instance_type_filter	`search *`

cloud_compute_instance_created_with_previously_unseen_instance_type_filter is an empty macro by default. It allows the user to filter out any results (false positives) without editing the SPL.

Annotations

- MITRE ATT&CK

+ Kill Chain Phases

+ NIST

+ CIS

- Threat Actors

ID	Technique	Tactic

NistCategory.DE_AE

Cis18Value.CIS_10

Default Configuration

This detection is configured by default in Splunk Enterprise Security to run with the following settings:

Setting	Value
Disabled	true
Cron Schedule	`0 * * * *`
Earliest Time	`-70m@m`
Latest Time	`-10m@m`
Schedule Window	`auto`
Creates Risk Event	True

This configuration file applies to all detections of type anomaly. These detections will use Risk Based Alerting.

Implementation

You must be ingesting your cloud infrastructure logs from your cloud provider. You should run the baseline search Previously Seen Cloud Compute Instance Types - Initial to build the initial table of instance types observed and times. You must also enable the second baseline search Previously Seen Cloud Compute Instance Types - Update to keep this table up to date and to age out old data. You can also provide additional filtering for this search by customizing the cloud_compute_instance_created_with_previously_unseen_instance_type_filter macro.

Known False Positives

It is possible that an admin will create a new system using a new instance type that has never been used before. Verify with the creator that they intended to create the system with the new instance type.

Associated Analytic Story

Cloud Cryptomining

Risk Based Analytics (RBA)

Risk Message	Risk Score	Impact	Confidence
User $user$ is creating an instance $dest$ with an instance type $instance_type$ that has not been previously seen.	30	50	60

The Risk Score is calculated by the following formula: Risk Score = (Impact * Confidence/100). Initial Confidence and Impact is set by the analytic author.

Detection Testing

Test Type	Status	Dataset	Source	Sourcetype
Validation	Not Applicable	N/A	N/A	N/A
Unit	✅ Passing	Dataset	`aws_cloudtrail`	`aws:cloudtrail`
Integration	✅ Passing	Dataset	`aws_cloudtrail`	`aws:cloudtrail`

Replay any dataset to Splunk Enterprise by using our replay.py tool or the UI. Alternatively you can replay a dataset into a Splunk Attack Range

Source: GitHub | Version: 2