Privilege Escalation: Effectively Anonymous Users Granted GKE Cluster Access

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 created an RBAC binding that references one of the following users or groups:

  • system:anonymous
  • system:authenticated
  • system:unauthenticated

These users and groups are effectively anonymous and should be avoided when creating role bindings or cluster role bindings to any RBAC roles. Review the binding to ensure that it is necessary. If the binding isn't necessary, remove it. For more details, see the log message for this finding.

  1. Review any bindings created that granted permissions to the system:anonymous user, system:unauthenticated group, or system:authenticated group.
  2. Determine whether there are other signs of malicious activity by the principal in the audit logs in Cloud Logging.

If there are signs of malicious activity, review guidance for investigating and removing the bindings that allowed this access.

What's next