Kubelet Pod Discovery Detected via Defend for Containers

Last updated 5 days ago on 2026-02-06
Created 5 days ago on 2026-02-06

About

This rule detects the use of built-in utilities to discover running pods on a Kubernetes cluster. The utilities used are du, nice, find, locate, and ls. These utilities are commonly used to discover running pods on a Kubernetes cluster. The "/var/lib/kubelet/pods" directory is the default location for Kubelet pod information.
Tags
Data Source: Elastic Defend for ContainersDomain: ContainerOS: LinuxUse Case: Threat DetectionTactic: DiscoveryLanguage: eql
Severity
low
Risk Score
21
MITRE ATT&CK™

Discovery (TA0007)(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-cloud_defend.file*logs-cloud_defend.process*
Related Integrations

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

Query
text code block:
sequence by container.id, user.id with maxspan=5s [any where host.os.type == "linux" and event.category in ("file", "process") and process.interactive == true and container.id like "*" and ( (event.category == "file" and event.type == "change" and event.action == "open" and file.path like "/var/lib/kubelet/pods/*") or (event.category == "process" and event.type == "start" and event.action == "exec" and ( (process.name in ("du", "nice", "find", "locate", "ls")) or (process.args in ( "du", "/bin/du", "/usr/bin/du", "/usr/local/bin/du", "nice", "/bin/nice", "/usr/bin/nice", "/usr/local/bin/nice", "find", "/bin/find", "/usr/bin/find", "/usr/local/bin/find", "locate", "/bin/locate", "/usr/bin/locate", "/usr/local/bin/locate", "ls", "/bin/ls", "/usr/bin/ls", "/usr/local/bin/ls" )) ) and process.args like "*/var/lib/kubelet/pods/*") )] with runs=5

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect Kubelet Pod Discovery Detected via Defend for Containers 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).