Egress Network Connection Followed by Command Execution
Description
Detects network connections originating from a binary located in a potentially suspicious location, followed by command execution. This behavior is consistent with C2 agents such as Poseidon and Athena, connecting to a C2 framework such as Mythic. The agent polls the C2 for commands through a web request, after which the command gets executed.
Query · eql
sequence with maxspan=5s
[network where event.type == "start" and event.action == "connection_attempted" and
process.executable like ("./*", "/boot/*", "/dev/shm/*", "/run/*", "/var/run/*", "/tmp/*", "/var/tmp/*") and
not (
process.executable like "/tmp/*/*" or
destination.ip == null or
destination.ip == "0.0.0.0" or
cidrmatch(
destination.ip, "10.0.0.0/8", "127.0.0.0/8", "169.254.0.0/16", "172.16.0.0/12",
"192.0.0.0/24", "192.0.0.0/29","192.0.0.8/32", "192.0.0.9/32", "192.0.0.10/32",
"192.0.0.170/32", "192.0.0.171/32", "192.0.2.0/24", "192.31.196.0/24", "192.52.193.0/24",
"192.168.0.0/16", "192.88.99.0/24", "224.0.0.0/4", "100.64.0.0/10", "192.175.48.0/24",
"198.18.0.0/15", "198.51.100.0/24", "203.0.113.0/24", "240.0.0.0/4", "::1", "FE80::/10",
"FF00::/8"
)
)
] by process.entity_id
[process where event.type == "start" and event.action == "exec" and
process.parent.executable like ("./*", "/boot/*", "/dev/shm/*", "/run/*", "/var/run/*", "/tmp/*", "/var/tmp/*") and
process.args like (
"ip*", "whoami*", "id*", "hostname*", "touch*", "curl*", "wget*", "chmod*", "busybox*", "chattr*", "echo*",
"php*", "perl*", "ruby*", "lua*", "openssl*", "nc*", "netcat*", "ncat*"
) and
not (
process.parent.executable in (
"/srv/nessus_agent/sbin/nessus-agent-module", "/var/log/amazon/ssm/patch-baseline-operations", "./app",
"./config.json/usr/local/bin/py.test", "./runc"
) or
process.parent.name in ("nseserv", "nexserv", "pycharm") or
process.parent.command_line == "/usr/bin/php ./boot-watcher.php" or
process.working_directory == "/usr/lib/adlumin" or
process.parent.executable like ("/run/k3s/containerd/*", "/run/user/*/.bubblewrap/opt/chef/bin/chef-client", "/run/containerd/*")
)
] by process.parent.entity_id