Malicious Cloudflared Tunnel Established with Token

ATT&CK techniques

C2

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
- T1219Remote Access Tools
- T1572Protocol Tunneling
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects cloudflared.exe running a tunnel with a token argument, a covert channel Huntress observed being launched through RMM tooling such as AgentPackageRunCommandInteractive to reach compromised MSP endpoints. Attackers use Cloudflare tunnels to proxy remote access past perimeter controls without inbound firewall changes. Token-based tunnel creation by cloudflared is a strong command-and-control indicator.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1219 — drag to rearrange

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Suspicious BeyondTrust Bomgar Process Spawning Remote Access Client (via process_creation)

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Suspicious PowerShell Spawned by VBScript for RMM Delivery

Malicious Cloudflared Tunnel Established with Token

Pivot detection · T1219 · 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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