Malicious Cloud Credential Enumeration Piped to Network Exfiltration (via process_creation)

ATT&CK techniques

Cred Access → Exfiltration

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
- T1552.001Credentials In Files
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
- T1567.002Exfiltration to Cloud Storage
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects an AWS STS caller-identity call whose output is piped into curl or wget to exfiltrate the caller context to a remote host. This pattern was triggered by an auto-loaded MCP configuration in the Amazon Q VS Code extension where a child process inherited AWS credentials. Attackers use it to confirm and steal an inherited cloud identity for follow-on access.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1552.001 — drag to rearrange

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Malicious Cloud Credential Enumeration Piped to Network Exfiltration (via process_creation)

Pivot detection · T1552.001 · 9 related

Detection content is published as a reviewed draft. Tune thresholds and exclusions against your own telemetry before enabling this rule for alerting.

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