Container-threat-detection

Calico Cloud currently includes following detectors focused on the execution and privilege-escalation stages of cyberattacks and intrusions.

Privilege-Escalation:

• Linux-Administrative-Command: A pod was detected executing Linux administrative commands using super-user privileges.
• Set-Linux-Capabilities: A pod was detected executing commands on the system to modify a file, user, or group capabilities

Execution:

• Attack Tools: A pod was detected executing a known attack tool on the pod. For example, nmap, nping, ndiff, masscan, amass…etc
• Cryptomining Pool Hostname: A pod was detected executing curl or wget to a crypto-mining pool, an indication that the pod may be used to mine cryptocurrency.
• Curl or wget to Suspicious TLD: A pod was detected executing curl or wget to a suspicious Top Level Domain (TLD). Attackers may use CLI tools such as CURL or WGET to communicate with attack infrastructure, or download malicious payloads.
• DNS Attack Tool: A pod was detected executing a known DNS attack tool on the pod
• System Enumeration Tool: A pod was detected executing a known third-party system enumeration tool

Enable on all nodes

kubectl get ds runtime-reporter -n calico-system -o yaml | sed '/enable-tigera-runtime-security/d' | kubectl apply -f -

Enable on specific nodes

To enable container threat detection on a particular node, add the enable-tigera-runtime-security: t label to that node. For example:

kubectl label nodes <node-name> enable-tigera-runtime-security=t

check running pods

Make sure that runtime-reporters pod is runing

kubectl get pods -n tigera-runtime-security

change aggregation period

The default configuration of the runtime-reporter has an Aggregation period of 15 minutes [period: 15m].
In order to expedite testing you may like to significantly reduce this to 15 seconds

kubectl -n calico-system edit daemonset.apps/runtime-reporter

Change the period: 15m to period: 15s

Note: optionally you can remove 'AnyProcessInSamePodPrefix' as well to get the pod name in the alert but You'd also get a lot of reports and alerts as a result.

deploy a testing pod

kubectl run multitool --image=wbitt/network-multitool

Examples to test

kubectl exec -it multitool -- bash

Linux-Administrative-Command

adduser joseph
su -
add user joseph
chown joseph file.txt

Set-Linux-Capabilities

touch file.txt
setcap cap_net_raw+ep file.txt

Attack Tools

nmap -Pn -r -p 1-900 $POD_IP

Mitigate the risk of exploitation using security policy

Once you get the alert and are sure this is not a legitimate activity, you may need to quarantine this pod using Calico security policy.

A best practice is to always have quarantine policy preconfigured in each cluster

apiVersion: projectcalico.org/v3
kind: GlobalNetworkPolicy
metadata:
  name: security.quarantine
spec:
  tier: security
  order: 100
  selector: quarantine == "true"
  ingress:
    - action: Log
    - action: Deny
  egress:
    - action: Log
    - action: Deny
  types:
    - Ingress
    - Egress

So you can easily quarantine the malicious workload by adding the label “quarantine=true", here is an example:

kubectl label pod maliciouspod quarantine=true