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 Automated SSH Lateral Movement with Batch Mode (via process_creation)

OpenSSH Native Server Feature Installation (via powershell)

OpenSSH Server Listening on Socket (via openssh)

Suspicious macOS SSH Loopback Connection for TCC Bypass

Suspicious Bruteforce via Password Reset (via security)

Suspicious SimpleHelp Remote Access Client Spawning Discovery Commands (via process_creation)

OpenEDR ssh-shellhost Spawning Cmd or PowerShell With PTY on Windows

Bitbucket Audit: Global SSH Settings Changed

Bitbucket Audit: SSH User Login Failures

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 →