
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