Suspicious Cloudflared Tunnel Execution via Renamed svchost Binary

ATT&CK techniques

C2

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
- T1572Protocol Tunneling
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects a process named svchost.exe running Cloudflare tunnel arguments from outside the System32 directory, matching the renamed cloudflared tunnel used by the RMMProject operators for covert C2 access. Adversaries rename cloudflared to svchost.exe to blend in while establishing an outbound tunnel. A svchost image running tunnel arguments from a non-system path is anomalous and indicates masqueraded tunneling.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1572 — drag to rearrange

Chisel Reverse Tunnel Tool Execution from Temporary Directory

Malicious Anubis Ransomware Cloudflare Tunnel via cloudflared (via process_creation)

Obfuscated RDP Tunneling Configuration Enabled for Port Forwarding (via process_creation)

Malicious RDP Tunneling (via rdp)

Suspicious SSH Reverse Tunnel via Renamed plink Utility on Triofox Host

Suspicious OpenSSH Reverse Tunnel Establishment via ssh.exe

Suspicious HelloNet SSH Reverse Tunnel via frontpage.exe (via process_creation)

Possible Ngrok RDP Tunnel Exposure via TCP 3389

Malicious Cloudflared Tunnel Established with Token

Suspicious Cloudflared Tunnel Execution via Renamed svchost Binary

Pivot detection · T1572 · 9 related

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

Full detection rule

Unlock this rule to view and copy it

The detection logic is included with a plan. Everything else — context, mappings and implementation details — stays free on this page.

Sign in for 3 free unlocks

Signing in gives you 3 unlocks to spend on any rule in the library. No card, and they do not expire.

Also included

Unlocked rules convert on this page — to Splunk SPL or Splunk — Raw Index SPL or Microsoft Sentinel KQL or Microsoft Sentinel ASIM ASIM KQL or Microsoft Defender XDR KQL or Elastic Security KQL or Elastic Security Lucene or Elastic Security ES|QL or CrowdStrike Falcon CQL or SentinelOne PowerQuery or Palo Alto Cortex XDR XQL or Carbon Black Cloud Platform Search or Carbon Black EDR Process Search or Google Security Operations UDM Search or IBM QRadar AQL or Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM Rules expression or Rapid7 InsightIDR LEQL or Graylog Search or OpenSearch Lucene or OpenSearch PPL PPL or Grafana Loki LogQL or SQLite SQL or Zircolite SQLite — with the log-source profile the engine picked, the field map it used, and everything it could not express. Converting a rule you have unlocked costs no further credit.

See it run on a free rule →Convert your own rule →