Suspicious IngressNightmare NGINX Ingress Controller Spawning Shell (CVE-2025-1974)

ATT&CK techniques

Initial Access → Defense Evasion

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
- T1190Exploit Public-Facing Application
Execution
- T1610Deploy Container
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
- T1610Deploy Container
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects the ingress-nginx worker process spawning a command shell, an outcome of IngressNightmare configuration injection leading to remote code execution. It matters because the ingress controller should never launch interactive shells, so this indicates hands on activity inside a Kubernetes cluster.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1190 — drag to rearrange

Possible IngressNightmare Exploitation via NGINX Loading Shared Object From Proc (CVE-2025-1974)

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Possible CUPS cups-browsed Remote Code Execution via Shell Child Process

Malicious mshta Execution Spawned by PHP-CGI (CVE-2024-4577)

Suspicious Helm Tiller Unauthenticated Access on Port 44134

Malicious PHASEJAM Webshell Dropped in Ivanti dana-na Auth Directory

Suspicious Modification of CUPS cups-browsed Configuration File

Suspicious OAST Callback DNS Query From Next.js Workload

Suspicious IngressNightmare NGINX Ingress Controller Spawning Shell (CVE-2025-1974)

Pivot detection · T1190 · 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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