Suspicious Kubelet Started With Anonymous Auth and AlwaysAllow Authorization

PremiumReviewedSigma · High · v1
Product
linux
Category
process_creation
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-11-05
Updated
2026-11-05

ATT&CK techniques

Initial Access
  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Execution

  4. Persistence

  5. Priv Esc

  6. Defense Evasion

  7. Cred Access

  8. Discovery

  9. Lateral Movement

  10. Collection

  11. C2

  12. Exfiltration

  13. Impact

What it detects

This rule detects the kubelet being started with anonymous authentication enabled and its authorization mode set to AlwaysAllow which disables access control on the kubelet API. Wiz lists this insecure configuration as a Kubernetes control plane initial access vector. This is important because it lets unauthenticated callers reach the kubelet to read secrets and execute commands inside running pods leading to node and cluster compromise.

Related detections9 linkedT1190 — drag to rearrange
Suspicious Kubernetes RBAC Binding Granting Access to Anonymous Users
Possible CUPS cups-browsed Remote Code Execution via Shell Child Process
Malicious mshta Execution Spawned by PHP-CGI (CVE-2024-4577)
Possible IngressNightmare Exploitation via NGINX Loading Shared Object From Proc (CVE-2025-1974)
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
Possible Ivanti EPMM Unauthenticated RCE via featureusage Expression Language Injection (via webserver)
Possible Palo Alto PAN-OS Management Auth Bypass via createRemoteAppwebSession Access (via webserver)
Suspicious Kubelet Started With Anonymous Auth and AlwaysAllow Authorization
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.