Techniques
Sample rules
Kubernetes and Cloud Credential Path Access via Process Arguments
- source: elastic
- technicques:
- T1528
- T1552
Description
Flags Linux process executions whose arguments reference high-value Kubernetes service-account material, kubeconfig or node PKI paths, or common cloud and SSH credential files, when invoked via typical file-reading utilities or from ephemeral directories. Useful for spotting in-cluster and hybrid credential theft early.
Detection logic
host.os.type:linux and event.category:process and event.action:(exec or executed) and
(
process.name:(
busybox or cat or head or tail or more or less or sed or awk or
find or grep or ls or whereis or cp or mv or ln or
curl or wget or scp or rsync or tar or zip or gzip or
base64 or xxd or od or dd or tee or strings or xargs or jq or yq or
openssl or ssh or sftp or nc or ncat or netcat or socat or
python* or perl* or ruby* or node or php* or lua* or .*
) or
process.args:(
cat or head or tail or more or less or sed or awk or
find or grep or cp or mv or curl or wget or base64 or
tar or scp or dd or strings or xargs
) or
process.executable:(/tmp/* or /var/tmp/* or /dev/shm/* or /home/* or /run/user/*)
) and process.args:(
"/var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/token" or
"/var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount/ca.crt" or
"/var/run/secrets/eks.amazonaws.com/serviceaccount/token" or
"/var/run/secrets/azure/tokens/azure-identity-token" or
"/var/run/secrets/tokens/azure-identity-token" or
"/var/lib/kubelet/kubeconfig" or
"/etc/kubernetes/admin.conf" or
"/etc/kubernetes/pki/ca.key" or
"/etc/kubernetes/pki/apiserver-kubelet-client.key" or
"/var/lib/kubelet/pki/kubelet-client-current.pem" or
"/etc/rancher/k3s/k3s.yaml" or
"/etc/shadow" or
*/.ssh/id_rsa or
*/root/.ssh/id_ed25519 or
*/.ssh/id_ecdsa or
*/.aws/credentials or
*/.aws/cli/cache/*.json or
*/.aws/sso/cache/*.json or
*/.azure/accessTokens.json or
*/.azure/azureProfile.json or
*/.azure/msal_token_cache.json or
*/.config/gcloud/application_default_credentials.json or
*/.config/gcloud/credentials.db or
*/.config/gcloud/access_tokens.db or
*/.config/gcloud/legacy_credentials or
*/.kube/config or
*/.docker/config.json
)