Suspicious EC2 Instance Connect SSH Public Key Push (via cloudtrail)

ATT&CK techniques

Persistence → Lateral Movement

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
- T1098Account Manipulation
Priv Esc
- T1098Account Manipulation
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
- T1021.007Cloud Services
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects the EC2 Instance Connect SendSSHPublicKey call that injects a temporary SSH key into a running instance, a lateral movement technique adversaries use to gain interactive shell access to cloud hosts. Because this API grants direct host access from control plane credentials, unexpected use is a meaningful indicator of an attacker pivoting into compute workloads.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1098 — drag to rearrange

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Suspicious Domain Admins Group Membership Addition via Net (via process_creation)

Malicious Account Added to Domain Admins via net localgroup

Suspicious Azure Key Vault Access Policy Modification

Suspicious EC2 Instance Connect SSH Public Key Push (via cloudtrail)

Pivot detection · T1098 · 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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