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العربيةDelete CloudTrail trail
Can delete a CloudTrail trail outright.
Grants escalation on its own.
cloudtrail:DeleteTrailOn its own, cloudtrail:DeleteTrail can delete a CloudTrail trail outright. On a wide resource scope that alone reaches blinded detection or removed guardrails.
Why it is dangerous
A principal can call cloudtrail:DeleteTrail to remove the trail entirely. Louder than StopLogging because the trail disappears from the console, but equally effective at ending recording - and already-delivered log files in S3 survive, so this blinds the future rather than erasing the past.
In MITRE ATT&CK terms this maps to T1562.008, Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Cloud Logs, under the defense evasion tactic. AWS records it in CloudTrail as DeleteTrail. The call is loud in CloudTrail and stands out from normal activity.
Detection
DeleteTrailPrerequisites
cloudtrail:DeleteTrail on the trail.
Tactic
Defense Evasion
A control that would remove it: Restrict cloudtrail:DeleteTrail to a break-glass role; deny it org-wide via SCP and alarm on the event.
Whether to apply it depends on how the permission is used in your environment, so it is a business decision rather than an automatic fix. The same permission can be load-bearing in one account and pure risk in another.
Pathbreak confirms whether this path resolves in your account, ranks it against the others by how much it opens up, and uses your threat model and business context to show which paths are worth cutting.
Questions
What does cloudtrail:DeleteTrail allow?
Can delete a CloudTrail trail outright.
Can cloudtrail:DeleteTrail escalate privileges on its own?
Yes. Held on a broad enough resource it reaches blinded detection or removed guardrails with no other permission.
How is delete CloudTrail trail detected?
Watch for DeleteTrail in CloudTrail. The call is loud in CloudTrail and stands out from normal activity.
How do you break this path?
A control that would remove it is: Restrict cloudtrail:DeleteTrail to a break-glass role; deny it org-wide via SCP and alarm on the event. Whether to apply it depends on how the permission is used in your account, so it is a business decision rather than an automatic fix.
Which MITRE ATT&CK technique is this?
T1562.008, Impair Defenses: Disable or Modify Cloud Logs, under the defense evasion tactic.
Related paths
References
Find this in your own account
We run a read-only scan of one AWS account and show you which of these paths exist, ranked by blast radius, with the change that breaks each one. First validated paths within the hour.