Let’s be honest. The initial breach is rarely the headline. A phishing click, a vulnerable web server—that’s just the opening act. The real, company-ending damage happens in the quiet moments that follow, when an attacker, armed with a single low-level credential, begins their silent climb up the access ladder. This is the art of identity privilege escalation, and in our complex, cloud-connected world, it has become the attacker’s primary objective.
It’s no longer about finding a single ‘root’ or ‘Administrator’ account. The modern attack surface is a sprawling, interconnected web of human users, service principals, machine identities, and ephemeral cloud roles. An attacker doesn’t need to break down the front door if they can find an unlocked window that leads to a key, which leads to another key, which ultimately unlocks the entire kingdom.
The Playbook: From Foothold to Fortress
Privilege escalation isn’t a single event; it’s a chain reaction. Attackers are masters at exploiting the complex trust relationships we build into our systems. By looking at a few high-profile incidents, we can see their playbook in action.
1. The Cloud Escalation Chain: The Capital One Breach
This wasn’t just a simple hack; it was a masterclass in cloud-native privilege escalation. The initial entry point was a Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability on a web application firewall (WAF). That was the foothold.
The crucial next step was leveraging the identity of that WAF. It had been assigned an overly permissive IAM (Identity and Access Management) role in AWS. The attacker used the access granted by this role to query the AWS metadata service, discover other roles, and ultimately access and exfiltrate data from dozens of S3 buckets. The lesson here is stark: a compromised machine identity can be just as, if not more, devastating than a compromised user account. The vulnerability got them in the door, but a misconfigured identity gave them the keys to the castle.
2. The Trust Forgery: The SolarWinds “Golden SAML” Attack
The SolarWinds incident took this concept to another level. After compromising the build environment, the attackers didn’t just hunt for passwords. They went after the heart of modern authentication: the SAML signing certificate. SAML is the bedrock of federated identity, allowing a user to log in once and access multiple services (like Microsoft 365).
By stealing the private key used to sign SAML assertions, the attackers could effectively become the identity provider. They could forge authentication tokens for any user, including those with the highest privileges, and access any federated service completely undetected. This “Golden SAML” attack is terrifying because traditional defenses like MFA and password rotation are rendered useless. You can’t stop an attacker who controls the very system that defines trust.
3. The CI/CD Pipeline Poisoning: The Codecov Supply Chain Attack
Modern development lives and dies by CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) pipelines. These automated systems build, test, and deploy code, and they are powered by highly privileged machine identities. In the Codecov breach, attackers gained access to a Docker image creation process.
By modifying that script, they were able to steal credentials (API keys, secrets) from the CI/CD environments of Codecov’s customers. Think about that for a second. The compromised identity wasn’t a user; it was a script. This script had the keys to thousands of other environments, allowing the attackers to pivot from a single supply chain target into a multitude of downstream victims. It highlights how identities in our automation and infrastructure are a ripe target for escalation.
The Technologies Under Siege
These attacks exploit the inherent complexity of our identity and access technologies:
- Cloud IAM (AWS, Azure, GCP): The sheer number of permissions, roles, and policies creates a minefield of potential misconfigurations. Attackers thrive on chaining together seemingly innocuous permissions to achieve a powerful outcome.
- Active Directory & Kerberos: On-prem is still a massive target. Techniques like Kerberoasting (cracking service account passwords) and Pass-the-Hash are classics for a reason—they still work, allowing attackers to move laterally and escalate within a corporate network.
- Federation Protocols (SAML & OAuth): These protocols are built on a chain of trust. As SolarWinds showed, if that trust can be compromised at the source, the entire security model collapses.
- Kubernetes RBAC: Role-Based Access Control in Kubernetes is incredibly powerful but also complex. A misconfigured role can allow an attacker to “break out” of a container, compromise the underlying node, and potentially take over the entire cluster.
Building the Fortress: A Modern Defense
So, how do we fight back? It’s not about building taller walls; it’s about better visibility and control over who—and what—can do what.
How to Avoid: Prevention & Mitigation
- Embrace Dynamic Least Privilege: The Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) is the goal, but in dynamic cloud environments, it’s a moving target. This is where Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) and Just-in-Time (JIT) access come in. Instead of granting standing privileges, grant temporary, elevated access on-demand for specific tasks. When the task is done, the access vanishes.
- Practice Impeccable Secret Hygiene: Credentials, API keys, and certificates should never be in code, config files, or environment variables. Use dedicated secrets management tools like HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or Azure Key Vault. Automate the rotation of these secrets to shrink the window of opportunity for an attacker.
- Shift Left with Identity: Scan your Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates (like Terraform or CloudFormation) for overly permissive IAM policies before they are ever deployed. This is proactive security that closes the door before it’s even installed.
- Harden the Core: Secure your identity providers. Whether it’s Active Directory or a cloud-based solution like Entra ID (Azure AD), this is your crown jewel. Tightly control who can manage it, enforce strong MFA, and heavily audit any changes.
How to Monitor: Detection & Response
You have to assume that a determined attacker will eventually get a foothold. Detection is about spotting their next move.
- Baseline and Hunt for Anomalies: You need to know what “normal” looks like for your identities. A developer in Brazil suddenly accessing a production database from an IP in Eastern Europe at 3 AM? That’s an anomaly. User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) systems are designed to automatically baseline behavior and flag these deviations.
- Audit, Audit, Audit: Your cloud audit logs (CloudTrail, Azure Monitor Logs) are your ground truth. Monitor for high-risk API calls that signal escalation attempts, such as:
iam:CreateAccessKeyiam:AttachUserPolicy- Modifying federation settings or trust policies.
- Focus on Identity-Specific Signals: Don’t just look for failed logins. Look for the subtle clues:
- An identity assuming a role it has never used before.
- The use of dormant or inactive accounts.
- A user account trying to access the cloud metadata service from a production host.
- Deploy Honeytokens: Create fake “canary” credentials and plant them in places like code repositories or configuration files. If an attacker finds and uses these tokens, it’s a high-fidelity alert that you have a breach, as no legitimate process should ever touch them.
The New Perimeter is Identity
Privilege escalation is a game of chess, not checkers. It’s about patience, strategy, and exploiting the intricate web of trust we’ve woven through our digital infrastructure. As defenders, our job is to understand that web better than our adversaries. By shifting our focus from preventing the initial breach to containing the blast radius and detecting the silent climb, we can turn the tables and ensure that a simple foothold never becomes a full-scale takeover.
