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AWS EKS Ephemeral Container Added to Pod

Elastic Detection Rules

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Summary
Detects updates to the ephemeralcontainers subresource of pods initiated by a non-system identity in AWS EKS by analyzing AWS EKS audit logs (aws.eks_audit). Ephemeral containers are commonly used for debugging (kubectl debug) but can be abused to inject tooling into a running pod, read mounted secrets, or execute commands in the target pod context. If abused, such actions can enable privilege escalation, lateral movement, or persistence without deploying a new workload. The rule triggers on updates/patches to pods.ephemeralcontainers where authorization_k8s_io/decision is allow, and excludes system/service accounts to reduce noise from legitimate cluster automation.
Categories
  • Cloud
  • AWS
  • Kubernetes
  • Containers
Data Sources
  • Pod
  • Cloud Service
ATT&CK Techniques
  • T1611
  • T1609
Created: 2026-08-03