Suspicious Write Attempt to AppArmor Policy Management Files

Last updated 7 days ago on 2026-03-17
Created 7 days ago on 2026-03-17

About

Detects processes attempting to write to AppArmor policy management pseudo-files located under "/sys/kernel/security/apparmor/". These special kernel interfaces are used to load, replace, or remove AppArmor profiles (".load", ".replace", ".remove"). In normal environments, AppArmor policy management is typically performed by administrative tools such as "apparmor_parser" during system initialization or package installation. Direct interaction with these pseudo-files from shell utilities, interpreters, or scripting environments is uncommon and may indicate attempts to modify security policy at runtime. Adversaries may abuse these interfaces to weaken or disable AppArmor protections, introduce malicious profiles, or exploit vulnerabilities in the AppArmor policy parser as part of local privilege escalation chains.
Tags
Domain: EndpointOS: LinuxUse Case: Threat DetectionTactic: Defense EvasionData Source: Elastic DefendData Source: Elastic EndgameData Source: CrowdstrikeData Source: SentinelOneLanguage: eql
Severity
medium
Risk Score
47
MITRE ATT&CK™

Defense Evasion (TA0005)(external, opens in a new tab or window)

License
Elastic License v2(external, opens in a new tab or window)

Definition

Rule Type
Event Correlation Rule
Integration Pack
Prebuilt Security Detection Rules
Index Patterns
logs-endpoint.events.process*endgame-*logs-crowdstrike.fdr*logs-sentinel_one_cloud_funnel.*
Related Integrations

endpoint(external, opens in a new tab or window)

crowdstrike(external, opens in a new tab or window)

sentinel_one_cloud_funnel(external, opens in a new tab or window)

Query
text code block:
process where host.os.type == "linux" and event.type == "start" and event.action in ("exec", "exec_event", "start", "ProcessRollup2") and ( process.name in ( "cat", "echo", "tee", "dd", "truncate", "bash", "dash", "sh", "tcsh", "csh", "zsh", "ksh", "fish", "busybox", "awk", "sed", "xargs", "find", "grep", "node", "timeout", "env" ) or process.name like (".*", "python*", "perl*", "ruby*", "lua*", "php*") ) and process.command_line like ( "*/sys/kernel/security/apparmor/.load*", "*/sys/kernel/security/apparmor/.replace*", "*/sys/kernel/security/apparmor/.remove*" )

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect Suspicious Write Attempt to AppArmor Policy Management Files in the Elastic Security detection engine by installing this rule into your Elastic Stack.

To setup this rule, check out the installation guide for Prebuilt Security Detection Rules(external, opens in a new tab or window).