Suspicious Credential File Discovery via Find on Linux

ATT&CK techniques

Cred Access

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
- T1552.001Credentials In Files
- T1552.004Private Keys
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects use of the find utility to recursively search common home and system directories for environment key and credential files which React2Shell CVE-2025-55182 post-exploitation scripts use to locate AWS SSH and application secrets for theft. Broad filesystem searches targeting env and key extensions indicate automated credential discovery on a compromised host.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1552.001 — drag to rearrange

Suspicious Double Base64 Decoded Payload Piped to Shell in CI (reviewdog Supply Chain)

Suspicious Credential File Harvesting of NPM Claude and SSH Secrets

Possible CI Runner Memory Scraping via Python Process Memory Read (tj-actions Supply Chain)

Suspicious TruffleHog Execution Spawned by Bun Runtime via Process Creation

Malicious AWS Credential Exfiltration via Curl or Wget in Process Creation

Suspicious sqlite3 Access to gcloud Cached Access Token Database (via process_creation)

Suspicious Shadow File Exfiltration Over Dev TCP on Linux via Process Creation (via process_creation)

Suspicious AWS GetCallerIdentity From TruffleHog User Agent via Cloudtrail

Suspicious GitHub CLI Auth Token Extraction via Command Line

Suspicious Credential File Discovery via Find on Linux

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.

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 →