Malicious Docker Socket Access via Curl Unix Socket

ATT&CK techniques

Priv Esc

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
- T1611Escape to Host
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects curl invocations that talk directly to the Docker daemon Unix socket, the technique an AI agent-driven actor used to create a privileged container and escape onto the host orchestration plane. Direct API calls to the docker.sock allow spawning containers that mount the host filesystem. This behavior is a strong container escape indicator.

Reporting behind it

Related detections6 linkedT1611 — drag to rearrange

Malicious Privileged Container Creation in Kubernetes (via audit)

Suspicious Cgroup release_agent Abuse for Container Escape

Malicious Direct etcd Write to Kubernetes Registry via ETCDCTL_API (via process_creation)

Malicious Container Escape via core_pattern Hijack (via process_creation)

Kubernetes Pod Created With hostPath Volume Mount

Kubernetes Privileged Pod Created via Pod Creation Requests

Malicious Docker Socket Access via Curl Unix Socket

Pivot detection · T1611 · 6 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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