Suspicious AWS API Activity From WinSCP Client User-Agent

PremiumReviewedSigma · Low · v1
Product
aws
Service
cloudtrail
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-11-03
Updated
2026-11-03

ATT&CK techniques

Initial Access → Exfiltration
  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Execution

  4. Cred Access

  5. Discovery

  6. Lateral Movement

  7. Collection

  8. C2

  9. Impact

What it detects

This rule detects CloudTrail events whose user agent identifies the WinSCP transfer client which Wiz associates with cloud-fluent threat actors staging and exfiltrating data from S3 after obtaining credentials. This is important because WinSCP is an interactive file transfer tool that is unusual for automated cloud workloads and its presence signals hands-on-keyboard misuse of stolen access.

Related detections9 linkedT1078.004 — drag to rearrange
Suspicious Salesforce Data Access via Spoofed Automation User-Agents
Suspicious Azure OpenAI Training File Upload via Files Import Operation (via azure)
Malicious Bapak AWS EKS CreateCluster With Known Cluster Name via CloudTrail
Malicious AWS IAM User Creation With Known Threat Actor Names
Suspicious AWS API Activity From S3 Browser Client User-Agent
Suspicious EKS Access Entry Creation via CloudTrail
Suspicious Azure CLI Service Principal Login with Inline Secret
Suspicious AWS Console Login Without MFA
Suspicious Device Code Authentication via Microsoft Authentication Broker
Suspicious AWS API Activity From WinSCP Client User-Agent
Pivot detection · T1078.004 · 9 related

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