CHAIN-057 — Break-glass account without MFA or monitoring

Summary

Severity: Critical · Likelihood: Medium · Logic: ALL

Why this chain matters

A break-glass Global Admin is excluded from every Conditional Access policy by design — but it is also excluded from sign-in monitoring alerts. The account credentials live in a shared password manager. Any insider with manager access can sign in silently.

Component rules

This chain fires when its trigger conditions are met by the following rules. Click any rule to see its detection logic and compliance mappings.

Rule ID	Role
zt_id_005	Trigger
zt_vis_008	Trigger

Attack walkthrough

Step 1 — Pull the break-glass password from the shared vault.

Actor: Insider
MITRE ATT&CK: T1078.002
Enabled by: zt_id_005

Attacker gain: Admin credential.

Step 2 — Sign in from anywhere; no CA policy blocks, no alert fires.

Actor: Insider
MITRE ATT&CK: T1078
Enabled by: zt_vis_008

Attacker gain: Silent Global Admin session.

Blast radius

Initial access	Insider with vault read.
Max privilege	Global Administrator.
Data at risk	Entire tenant + every subscription
Services at risk	All of Azure + Microsoft 365

How the logic works

The chain fires only when every rule above has at least one finding in the current scan. Missing any one rule breaks the chain — so remediating any single step disrupts the attack path.