Suspicious sshpass Noninteractive SSH Password Authentication (via process_creation)

ATT&CK techniques

Cred Access → Lateral Movement

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
- T1110.001Password Guessing
Discovery
Lateral Movement
- T1021.004SSH
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects use of sshpass to supply an SSH password on the command line, the method ShinyHunters used for credential spraying across PeopleSoft nodes listed in /etc/hosts during the education sector campaign. Adversaries rely on sshpass to automate password-based lateral movement, and passing credentials inline is rarely legitimate in enterprise environments, so this behavior deserves scrutiny.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1021.004 — drag to rearrange

Suspicious Remote Apple Events Enablement via systemsetup

Windows HackTool Execution: GoldenDMSA.exe Launch with Directory Manipulation Parameters

Windows Security: Kerberos 4771 Pre-Authentication Failures for Machine Account Password Guessing

Suspicious Reverse SSH Tunnel Exposing Local SSH via process_creation

Suspicious OpenSSH Reverse Tunnel Creation via Process Creation

Suspicious vCenter VAMI SSH Enable via appliance access API

Malicious vmanage-admin Public Key Authentication in SSH Auth Log

Malicious Bad Apples Remote Apple Events Lateral Movement via osascript

Suspicious OpenSSH Reverse Tunnel Over HTTPS Port (Chaos Ransomware)

Suspicious sshpass Noninteractive SSH Password Authentication (via process_creation)

Pivot detection · T1021.004 · 9 related

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

Full detection rule

Unlock this rule to view and copy it

The detection logic is included with a plan. Everything else — context, mappings and implementation details — stays free on this page.

Sign in for 3 free unlocks

Signing in gives you 3 unlocks to spend on any rule in the library. No card, and they do not expire.

Also included

Unlocked rules convert on this page — to Splunk SPL or Splunk — Raw Index SPL or Microsoft Sentinel KQL or Microsoft Sentinel ASIM ASIM KQL or Microsoft Defender XDR KQL or Elastic Security KQL or Elastic Security Lucene or Elastic Security ES|QL or CrowdStrike Falcon CQL or SentinelOne PowerQuery or Palo Alto Cortex XDR XQL or Carbon Black Cloud Platform Search or Carbon Black EDR Process Search or Google Security Operations UDM Search or IBM QRadar AQL or Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM Rules expression or Rapid7 InsightIDR LEQL or Graylog Search or OpenSearch Lucene or OpenSearch PPL PPL or Grafana Loki LogQL or SQLite SQL or Zircolite SQLite — with the log-source profile the engine picked, the field map it used, and everything it could not express. Converting a rule you have unlocked costs no further credit.

See it run on a free rule →Convert your own rule →