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Socat Process Activity

A Socat process is running on a Linux host. Socat is often used as a persistence mechanism by exporting a reverse shell, or by serving a shell on a listening port. Socat is also sometimes used for lateral movement.

Detection logic

Its licence does not clear it for publishing here

Sunturai publishes a detection's own text where the licence it arrived under has been reviewed and permits it, and Elastic License 2.0 has not. The query as its source wrote it, its canonical form and the hash that pins this revision are in the workspace record.

Detection requirements

Log source category
event_index

Known benign triggers

  • Socat is a dual-use tool that can be used for benign or malicious activity. Some normal use of this program, at varying levels of frequency, may originate from scripts, automation tools, and frameworks. Usage by web servers is more likely to be suspicious.

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