Suspicious Remote Command Execution to EC2 Instances via AWS SSM

ATT&CK techniques

Execution → Lateral Movement

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
- T1651Cloud Administration Command
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
- T1021.007Cloud Services
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects use of AWS Systems Manager to run commands or open interactive sessions on EC2 instances through SendCommand and StartSession events. Adversaries with valid cloud credentials abuse SSM to reach virtual machines without SSH or RDP as described in Unit 42 cloud VM attack path research. Detecting these calls exposes control-plane driven access to compute workloads.

Reporting behind it

Related detections6 linkedT1021.007 — drag to rearrange

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Suspicious EC2 Serial Console SSH Public Key Push (via cloudtrail)

AWS CloudTrail GetSigninToken Requests with Suspected Console User-Agent

Suspicious Remote Command Execution to EC2 Instances via AWS SSM

Pivot detection · T1021.007 · 6 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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