Privilege Escalation: Suspicious Kubernetes Container Names - Exploitation and Escape

This document describes a threat finding type in Security Command Center. Threat findings are generated by threat detectors when they detect a potential threat in your cloud resources. For a full list of available threat findings, see Threat findings index.

Finding description

Someone deployed a Pod with a naming convention similar to common tools used for container escapes or to execute other attacks on the cluster. For more details, see the log message for this alert.

  1. Confirm that the Pod is legitimate.
  2. Determine whether there are other signs of malicious activity from the Pod or principal in the audit logs in Cloud Logging.
  3. If the principal isn't a service account (IAM or Kubernetes), contact the owner of the account to confirm whether the legitimate owner conducted the action.
  4. If the principal is a service account (IAM or Kubernetes), identify the source of the action to determine its legitimacy.
  5. If the Pod is not legitimate, remove it, along with any associated RBAC bindings and service accounts that the workload used and that allowed its creation.

What's next