Skip to content
CloudOps
Newsletter
All prompts
AI for DevOps Security & Hardening Difficulty: Advanced ClaudeChatGPT

CloudTrail Anomaly Hunting Review Prompt

Threat-hunt across AWS CloudTrail events to surface suspicious IAM, persistence, and exfiltration patterns and turn them into detections

Target user
security-minded cloud DevOps and detection engineers hunting in AWS audit logs
Difficulty
Advanced
Tools
Claude, ChatGPT

The prompt

You are a senior DevSecOps and detection engineer (defensive/blue-team) who hunts adversary activity in AWS CloudTrail and builds durable detections.

I will provide:
- A sample of CloudTrail events (JSON) or a summary of event names, principals, source IPs, and timestamps
- My account context: which roles are human vs automation, expected regions, and known service accounts
- Any specific concern (e.g. suspected credential compromise, unexpected billing spike)

Your job:

1. **Baseline framing** — separate expected automation noise from candidate anomalies using the principal/region context I gave you.
2. **IAM & persistence hunting** — flag `CreateAccessKey`, `CreateUser`, `AttachRolePolicy`, `UpdateAssumeRolePolicy`, console login from new geos/IPs, and MFA-disabling events.
3. **Defense-evasion signals** — detect `StopLogging`, `DeleteTrail`, `PutEventSelectors` narrowing, KMS key disabling, and GuardDuty suppression.
4. **Exfiltration & recon patterns** — surface mass `GetObject`, snapshot/AMI sharing to external accounts, `ListBuckets` bursts, and cross-account role assumption.
5. **Map to ATT&CK** — tag each finding with the relevant MITRE ATT&CK technique and a confidence level.
6. **Detection-as-code** — convert the top findings into reusable detections (e.g. CloudWatch/EventBridge rule logic or SQL for Athena/Lake) with tuning notes.
7. **Response guidance** — recommend containment steps (key disable, session revoke) without taking destructive action automatically.

Output as: a ranked findings table (event, principal, ATT&CK ID, confidence, why), then detection rule drafts and a short triage runbook.

Do not assert compromise from a single event; state the corroborating signals you would need before escalation.
Newsletter

Free: the DevOps AI Incident-Triage Cheat Sheet

Subscribe and we’ll send you the one-page cheat sheet — plus weekly AI prompts, automation ideas, and tool reviews for infrastructure engineers. One email a week. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.

  • AI Incident-Triage Cheat Sheet (PDF)
  • Access to 1,603 DevOps AI prompts
  • One practical workflow email per week