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MediumSigmaHQJennifer Batina

Shell Spawned by Celery Worker Process

Detects a system shell interpreter being spawned directly by a Celery worker process. This behavior indicates a Python background task execution framework is evaluating raw string input through a shell execution…

Description

Detects a system shell interpreter being spawned directly by a Celery worker process. This behavior indicates a Python background task execution framework is evaluating raw string input through a shell execution context, which is highly indicative of successful command or prompt injection exploitation against an LLM agent task.

Detection logic

Detection requirements

Platform
ESXiLinuxmacOSNetwork Devices

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

Log source product
linux
Log source category
process_creation

Known benign triggers

  • Legacy or custom administrative tasks deliberately hardcoded with shell=True or os.system execution inside Celery task functions.
  • Media processing, deployment, or reporting pipelines that intentionally shell out to external tools (e.g. ffmpeg, git) from within a task.

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