Execution: Kubernetes Pod Created with Potential Reverse Shell Arguments

Premium and Enterprise service tiers

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.

Overview

Someone created a Pod that contains commands or arguments commonly associated with a reverse shell. Attackers use reverse shells to expand or maintain their initial access to a cluster and to execute arbitrary commands. For more details, see the log message for this alert.

How to respond

The following response plan might be appropriate for this finding, but might also impact operations. Carefully evaluate the information you gather in your investigation to determine the best way to resolve findings.

To respond to this finding, do the following:

1. Confirm that the Pod has a legitimate reason to specify these commands and arguments.
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 legitimacy of what caused the service account to perform this action
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

• Learn how to work with threat findings in Security Command Center.
• Refer to the Threat findings index.
• Learn how to review a finding through the Google Cloud console.
• Learn about the services that generate threat findings.