Suspicious prt-scan Campaign Credential Harvesting via proc environ Scan (via process_creation)

PremiumReviewedSigma · Medium · v1
Product
linux
Category
process_creation
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-08-14
Updated
2026-08-28

ATT&CK techniques

Cred Access
  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Initial Access

  4. Execution

  5. Persistence

  6. Priv Esc

  7. Defense Evasion

  8. Discovery

  9. Lateral Movement

  10. Collection

  11. C2

  12. Exfiltration

  13. Impact

What it detects

This rule detects processes reading other processes environment blocks through /proc/*/environ which the prt-scan background daemon uses to sweep memory for AWS Cloudflare Netlify and NPM tokens on CI runners. Broad scanning of /proc environ files is uncommon in normal build activity and suggests credential harvesting.

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Suspicious prt-scan Campaign Credential Harvesting via proc environ Scan (via process_creation)
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.