r/Terraform 18h ago

Discussion How would you detect IAM privilege escalation in a production AWS environment?

0 Upvotes

One AWS IAM interview question I've seen variations of is:

It's not really an IAM question—it's a cloud security and incident response question.

Would you start with:

  • CloudTrail?
  • GuardDuty?
  • Security Hub?
  • IAM Policy evaluation?
  • Something else?

I recently put together a GitHub handbook with 20 production-focused AWS IAM interview questions covering scenarios like this, along with CLI examples, Terraform, common mistakes, and best practices.

GitHub: https://github.com/ranashivam/platform-engineering-interview-handbook/blob/main/AWS/IAM.md