Elastic Security Detection Rules

AWS EC2 Full Network Packet Capture Detected

Last updated 22 days ago on 2025-10-23
Created 5 years ago on 2021-05-05

About

Detects successful creation of an Amazon EC2 Traffic Mirroring session. A session copies full packets from a source Elastic Network Interface (ENI) to a mirror target (e.g., an ENI or NLB) using a mirror filter (ingress/egress rules). While used for diagnostics and NDR/IDS tooling, adversaries can abuse sessions to covertly capture and exfiltrate sensitive, potentially unencrypted, traffic from instances or subnets.
Tags
Domain: CloudData Source: AWSData Source: Amazon Web ServicesData Source: AWS EC2Use Case: Network Security MonitoringTactic: ExfiltrationTactic: CollectionLanguage: kuery
Severity
medium
Risk Score
47
MITRE ATT&CK™

Exfiltration (TA0010)(opens in a new tab or window)

↳ Automated Exfiltration (T1020)(opens in a new tab or window)

↳ Transfer Data to Cloud Account (T1537)(opens in a new tab or window)

Collection (TA0009)(opens in a new tab or window)

↳ Data Staged (T1074)(opens in a new tab or window)

Discovery (TA0007)(opens in a new tab or window)

↳ Network Sniffing (T1040)(opens in a new tab or window)

False Positive Examples
Traffic Mirroring may be done by a system or network administrator. Verify whether the user identity, user agent, and/or hostname should be making changes in your environment. Traffic Mirroring from unfamiliar users or hosts should be investigated. If known behavior is causing false positives, it can be exempted from the rule.
License
Elastic License v2(opens in a new tab or window)

Definition

Rule Type
Query (Kibana Query Language)
Integration Pack
Prebuilt Security Detection Rules
Index Patterns
filebeat-*logs-aws.cloudtrail-*
Related Integrations

aws(opens in a new tab or window)

Query
event.dataset: "aws.cloudtrail" and 
    event.provider: "ec2.amazonaws.com" and
    event.action: "CreateTrafficMirrorSession" and
    event.outcome: "success"

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect AWS EC2 Full Network Packet Capture Detected 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(opens in a new tab or window).