MITRE ATT&CK technique

T1535

Unused/Unsupported Cloud Regions

About this technique

Adversaries may create cloud instances in unused geographic service regions in order to evade detection. Access is usually obtained through compromising accounts used to manage cloud infrastructure.

Read the full ATT&CK description

Cloud service providers often provide infrastructure throughout the world in order to improve performance, provide redundancy, and allow customers to meet compliance requirements. Oftentimes, a customer will only use a subset of the available regions and may not actively monitor other regions. If an adversary creates resources in an unused region, they may be able to operate undetected.

A variation on this behavior takes advantage of differences in functionality across cloud regions. An adversary could utilize regions which do not support advanced detection services in order to avoid detection of their activity.

An example of adversary use of unused AWS regions is to mine cryptocurrency through Resource Hijacking, which can cost organizations substantial amounts of money over time depending on the processing power used.(Citation: CloudSploit - Unused AWS Regions)

TA0005
Curated mapping

Curated incident relationships

These associations come from maintained incident records. The recorded confidence is shown when the source record provides it.

0 items
No curated incident mappings yet.
Heuristic association

Daily items linked through predicted CVEs

A Daily item appears here when it mentions a CVE whose triage artifact predicts this technique. This is not a verified ATT&CK mapping.

0 items
No heuristic Daily associations yet.
Heuristic association

Predicted CVE associations

These backfilled or model-produced candidates come from the current triage artifact. They are informational, not official MITRE mappings.

0 items
No predicted associations yet for this technique.
T1535 · Unused/Unsupported Cloud Regions · Baitaphish