Suspicious Cloud Instance Metadata Access via Command Line Tool

ATT&CK techniques

Cred Access

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
- T1552.001Credentials In Files
- T1552.005Cloud Instance Metadata API
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects curl or wget requesting the cloud instance metadata endpoint 169.254.169.254, observed in a Huntress Linux intrusion where the actor queried metadata to harvest instance credentials. The link-local metadata service exposes IAM tokens and configuration to any process that can reach it. Command-line access to this endpoint from a shell is a common cloud credential-access technique.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1552.001 — drag to rearrange

Suspicious Access to Cloud and Database Credential Files via Process

Suspicious prt-scan Campaign Credential Harvesting via proc environ Scan (via process_creation)

Suspicious TruffleHog Secret Scanner Spawned by Node Package Manager on Linux

Suspicious Shai-Hulud 2.0 Harvested Secret Dump File Creation

Suspicious Cloud Instance Metadata Credential Access via curl to IMDS (via process_creation)

Suspicious Environment Variable Dump Piped to Base64 for CI Credential Exfil

Suspicious GitHub CLI Token Extraction With Secret Scanner in CI Pipeline

Suspicious Secret Scanning with trufflehog Verified Results

Suspicious Wireless Credential Theft via netsh wlan Key Export

Suspicious Cloud Instance Metadata Access via Command Line Tool

Pivot detection · T1552.001 · 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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