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GKE Suspicious Assignment of Controller Service Account

Detects a request to attach a built-in kube-controller-manager service account to a pod running in the kube-system namespace on GKE. These service accounts are admin-equivalent and are not normally assigned to…

Description

Detects a request to attach a built-in kube-controller-manager service account to a pod running in the kube-system namespace on GKE. These service accounts are admin-equivalent and are not normally assigned to arbitrary pods. An attacker who can create pods in kube-system can abuse these tokens for cluster-wide privilege escalation.

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

Platform
ContainersESXiIaaSIdentity ProviderLinuxmacOSNetwork DevicesOffice SuiteSaaSWindows

The rule states no platform. This is derived from the 2 ATT&CK techniques it maps to.

Log source category
event_index

Known benign triggers

  • Built-in controller service accounts are rarely assigned to running pods. False positives should be rare; allowlist documented platform automation by actor when baselined.

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