hunting-for-living-off-the-cloud-techniques

name	hunting-for-living-off-the-cloud-techniques
description	Hunt for adversary abuse of legitimate cloud services for C2, data staging, and exfiltration including abuse of Azure, AWS, GCP services, and SaaS platforms. Use when hunting for adversary abuse of legitimate cloud services for c2,.
domain	cybersecurity
tags	["threat-hunting","mitre-attack","cloud-abuse","c2","lotc","saas","proactive-detection"]
subdomain	threat-hunting
version	1.0
author	oyi77
license	Apache-2.0
d3fend_techniques	["Application Protocol Command Analysis","Network Isolation","Network Traffic Analysis","Client-server Payload Profiling","Network Traffic Community Deviation"]
nist_csf	["DE.CM-01","DE.AE-02","DE.AE-07","ID.RA-05"]

Hunting For Living Off The Cloud Techniques

Overview

Cybersecurity skill for hunting for living off the cloud techniques. Follows industry best practices and security standards.

When to Use

Trigger phrases:

• "hunting for living off the cloud techniques"

• "When proactively hunting for indicators of hunting for living off the cloud tech"

• "After threat intelligence indicates active campaigns using these techniques"

• "During incident response to scope compromise related to these techniques"

• When proactively hunting for indicators of hunting for living off the cloud techniques in the environment

• After threat intelligence indicates active campaigns using these techniques

• During incident response to scope compromise related to these techniques

• When EDR or SIEM alerts trigger on related indicators

• During periodic security assessments and purple team exercises

When NOT to Use

• When you lack proper authorization for testing
• For production systems without change management
• When the task requires legal or compliance expertise beyond technical scope

Prerequisites

• EDR platform with process and network telemetry (CrowdStrike, MDE, SentinelOne)
• SIEM with relevant log data ingested (Splunk, Elastic, Sentinel)
• Sysmon deployed with comprehensive configuration
• Windows Security Event Log forwarding enabled
• Threat intelligence feeds for IOC correlation

Workflow

# Example: IOC detection
import re

IOC_PATTERNS = {
    "ip": r"\b(?:\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}\b",
    "domain": r"\b[a-z0-9-]+\.[a-z]{2,}\b",
    "hash_md5": r"\b[a-f0-9]{32}\b",
    "hash_sha256": r"\b[a-f0-9]{64}\b",
}

def extract_iocs(text: str) -> dict:
    return {k: re.findall(v, text)  k, v  IOC_PATTERNS.items()}