Suspicious Container Image Export via ctr in Cloud Model Exfiltration

ATT&CK techniques

Discovery → Exfiltration

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
- T1613Container and Resource Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
- T1537Transfer Data to Cloud Account
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects use of the containerd ctr client to export a container image to a local tar archive on a Kubernetes node. This behavior matches the ModeLeak attack against Vertex AI where an attacker abused a compromised service agent to pull and export proprietary LLM model images. Exporting images to disk is a precursor to staging and exfiltrating sensitive model or workload data from cloud tenants.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1613 — drag to rearrange

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Malicious Kubernetes Reconnaissance Tooling Activity

Suspicious EC2 Snapshot Attribute Modification for External Sharing via CloudTrail

Suspicious Cross-Project Compute Snapshot Creation via GCP Audit

Suspicious Container Environment Reconnaissance in Serverless Build

Suspicious Compute Disk IAM Policy Modification Granting Owner Role via GCP Audit

Suspicious Container Image Export via ctr in Cloud Model Exfiltration

Pivot detection · T1613 · 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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