Suspicious Environment Variable Dump Piped to Base64 for CI Credential Exfil

ATT&CK techniques

Cred Access → Exfiltration

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
- T1552.001Credentials In Files
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
- T1567Exfiltration Over Web Service
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects a process reading the full environment and piping it through base64 encoding to stage secrets for exfiltration as seen in CI CD pipeline abuse research by Elastic. Dumping env with null separators and double base64 encoding is a hallmark of automated credential harvesting inside build runners.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1552.001 — drag to rearrange

Suspicious Credential Exfiltration to webhook.site (via dns_query)

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

Malicious NPM Backdoor C2 Beacon to Injective Telemetry Endpoint via Proxy

Malicious Destructive Recursive Delete of Home Directory

Suspicious Process Memory Secret Dump via proc mem

Suspicious DNS Exfiltration to azurestaticprovider Backdoor Domain

Suspicious Azure Key Vault Access Policy Modification

Suspicious Environment Variable Dump Piped to Base64 for CI Credential Exfil

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 →