Sigma rule: Container Residence Discovery Via Proc Virtual FS

Rule

Title

Container Residence Discovery Via Proc Virtual FS

Status

test

Level

low

Author

Seth Hanford

Date

2023-08-23

File

rules/linux/process_creation/proc_creation_lnx_susp_container_residence_discovery.yml

Commit

ccbb0369507f796db0b0ae6854c8a2be471b9d84

Detects potential container discovery via listing of certain kernel features in the "/proc" virtual filesystem

Log source

product

linux

category

process_creation

Detection

selection_tools:
    Image|endswith:
        - 'awk'
        - '/cat'
        - 'grep'
        - '/head'
        - '/less'
        - '/more'
        - '/nl'
        - '/tail'
selection_procfs_kthreadd:  # outside containers, PID 2 == kthreadd
    CommandLine|contains: '/proc/2/'
selection_procfs_target:
    CommandLine|contains: '/proc/'
    CommandLine|endswith:
        - '/cgroup'  # cgroups end in ':/' outside containers
        - '/sched'   # PID mismatch when run in containers
condition: selection_tools and 1 of selection_procfs_*

False positives (as the rule lists them)

• Legitimate system administrator usage of these commands
• Some container tools or deployments may use these techniques natively to determine how they proceed with execution, and will need to be filtered

Tags

• attack.discovery
• attack.t1082

MITRE ATT&CK ids this rule names

• T1082

References

• https://blog.skyplabs.net/posts/container-detection/
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20010199/how-to-determine-if-a-process-runs-inside-lxc-docker

Read on 2026-11-03T00:58:21.399Z under licence sigma-drl-1.1@d5f4c36a from https://github.com/SigmaHQ/sigma/blob/ccbb0369507f796db0b0ae6854c8a2be471b9d84/rules/linux/process_creation/proc_creation_lnx_susp_container_residence_discovery.yml