Malicious Remote Payload Piped to Shell via wget on PAN-OS

PremiumReviewedSigma · High · v1
Category
process_creation
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-06-29
Updated
2026-08-28

ATT&CK techniques

Execution → C2
  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Initial Access

  4. Persistence

  5. Priv Esc

  6. Defense Evasion

  7. Cred Access

  8. Discovery

  9. Lateral Movement

  10. Collection

  11. Exfiltration

  12. Impact

What it detects

This rule detects a remote payload being downloaded with wget and piped directly into a shell interpreter, a technique used in Operation MidnightEclipse to fetch second-stage tooling after exploiting CVE-2024-3400. Piping downloaded content straight to bash leaves no file on disk and is a common in-memory execution pattern. Detecting this reveals remote code retrieval and execution on the appliance.

Related detections9 linkedT1059.004 — drag to rearrange
Possible Mirai IoT Payload Staging via chmod on Linux (via process_creation)
Suspicious GeoServer Java Process Spawning Download Utility
Malicious Linux Payload Download and Execution Chain via Wget and Chmod (via process_creation)
Suspicious tmp Download and Execute Chain on Embedded Linux
Suspicious Bash Dev-TCP Reverse Shell Execution
Malicious Remote Script Piped to Shell via Curl (via process_creation)
Suspicious Downloaded Shell Stager Made Executable Via Chmod 777
Malicious Remote Script Piped Directly to a Shell (via process_creation)
HamsaUpdate Linux Payload Download via Wget Piped to Bash (via process_creation)
Malicious Remote Payload Piped to Shell via wget on PAN-OS
Pivot detection · T1059.004 · 9 related

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