Potential Privilege Escalation via Container Misconfiguration

This rule monitors for the execution of processes that interact with Linux containers through an interactive shell without root permissions. Utilities such as runc and ctr are universal command-line utilities leveraged to interact with containers via root permissions. On systems where the access to these utilities are misconfigured, attackers might be able to create and run a container that mounts the root folder or spawn a privileged container vulnerable to a container escape attack, which might allow them to escalate privileges and gain further access onto the host file system.

Rule type: eql

Rule indices:

Severity: medium

Risk score: 47

Runs every: 5m

Searches indices from: now-9m (Date Math format, see also Additional look-back time)

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

References:

Tags:

Version: 4

Rule authors:

Rule license: Elastic License v2

process where host.os.type == "linux" and event.action == "exec" and event.type == "start" and (
  (process.name == "runc" and process.args == "run") or
  (process.name == "ctr" and process.args == "run" and process.args in ("--privileged", "--mount"))
) and not user.Ext.real.id == "0" and not group.Ext.real.id == "0" and
process.interactive == true and process.parent.interactive == true