Malicious EKS Pod Identity Credential Theft via Link-Local Endpoint

ATT&CK techniques

Defense Evasion → Lateral Movement

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
- T1550.001Application Access Token
Cred Access
- T1552.007Container API
Discovery
Lateral Movement
- T1550.001Application Access Token
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects command line access to the EKS Pod Identity credential endpoint at 169.254.170.23/v1/credentials. Wiz Research demonstrated that a compromised pod can request this URL with a stolen authorization token to retrieve IAM credentials, so direct interaction with this endpoint outside the SDK indicates credential theft.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1550.001 — drag to rearrange

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Malicious EKS Pod Identity Credential Theft via Link-Local Endpoint

Pivot detection · T1550.001 · 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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