Suspicious Privileged or Host Namespace Kubernetes Pod Creation

PremiumReviewedSigma · Medium · v1
Product
kubernetes
Service
audit
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-10-15
Updated
2026-10-15

ATT&CK techniques

Priv Esc
  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Initial Access

  4. Execution

  5. Persistence

  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 creation of Kubernetes pods that request privileged containers or share the host PID IPC or network namespaces as described in NCC Group Kubernetes detection engineering research. Adversaries deploy such pods to break container isolation and gain access to the underlying node which is a common container escape and persistence technique.

Related detections7 linkedT1611 — drag to rearrange
Malicious Privileged Container Creation in Kubernetes (via audit)
Malicious Docker Socket Access via Curl Unix Socket
Suspicious Cgroup release_agent Abuse for Container Escape
Malicious Direct etcd Write to Kubernetes Registry via ETCDCTL_API (via process_creation)
Malicious Container Escape via core_pattern Hijack (via process_creation)
Kubernetes Pod Created With hostPath Volume Mount
Kubernetes Privileged Pod Created via Pod Creation Requests
Suspicious Privileged or Host Namespace Kubernetes Pod Creation
Pivot detection · T1611 · 7 related

Detection content is published as a reviewed draft. Tune thresholds and exclusions against your own telemetry before enabling this rule for alerting.