Suspicious Automated SSH Lateral Movement with Batch Mode (via process_creation)

ATT&CK techniques

Lateral Movement

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
- T1021.004SSH
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects non interactive SSH connection attempts that disable host key checking and use batch mode with a short connect timeout, the pattern the Tomcat campaign uses to spread across hosts with harvested keys. Configuration management tooling can produce similar commands so validate the source process.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1021.004 — drag to rearrange

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OpenSSH Native Server Feature Installation (via powershell)

OpenSSH Server Listening on Socket (via openssh)

Suspicious Automated SSH Lateral Movement with Batch Mode (via process_creation)

Pivot detection · T1021.004 · 9 related

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

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