Unexpected Child Shell

Premium and Enterprise service tiers

Preview

This feature is subject to the "Pre-GA Offerings Terms" in the General Service Terms section of the Service Specific Terms. Pre-GA features are available "as is" and might have limited support. For more information, see the launch stage descriptions.

This document describes a threat finding type in Security Command Center. Threat findings are generated by threat detectors when they detect a potential threat in your cloud resources. For a full list of available threat findings, see Threat findings index.

Overview

Agent Engine Threat Detection observed a process that unexpectedly spawned a child shell process. This event might indicate that an attacker is trying to abuse shell commands and scripts.

Agent Engine Threat Detection is the source of this finding.

How to respond

To respond to this finding, do the following:

Review finding details

1. Open the Unexpected Child Shell finding as directed in Reviewing findings. Review the details on the Summary and JSON tabs.

2. On the Summary tab, review the information in the following sections:

   • What was detected, especially the following fields:
     • Parent process: the process that unexpectedly created the child shell process
     • Child process: the child shell process
     • Arguments: the arguments provided to the child shell process binary
     • Environment variables: the environment variables of the child shell process binary
   • Affected resource, especially the following fields:
     • Resource full name: the full resource name of the affected AI agent (a ReasoningEngine resource)
   • Related links, especially the following field:
     • VirusTotal indicator: link to the VirusTotal analysis page

3. On the JSON tab, note the following fields:

   • processes: an array containing all processes related to the finding. This array includes the child shell process and the parent process.
   • resource:
     • project_display_name: name of the project that contains the assets.

4. Look for related findings that occurred at a similar time for the affected AI agent. Such findings might indicate that this activity was malicious, instead of a failure to follow best practices.

5. Review the settings of the affected AI agent.

6. Check the logs for the affected AI agent.

Research attack and response methods

1. Review the MITRE ATT&CK framework entry for this finding type: Command and Scripting Interpreter: Unix Shell.
2. Check the SHA-256 hash value for the binary flagged as malicious on VirusTotal by clicking the link in VirusTotal indicator. VirusTotal is an Alphabet-owned service that provides context on potentially malicious files, URLs, domains, and IP addresses.
3. To develop a response plan, combine your investigation results with the MITRE research and VirusTotal analysis.

What's next

• Learn how to work with threat findings in Security Command Center.
• Refer to the Threat findings index.
• Learn how to review a finding through the Google Cloud console.
• Learn about the services that generate threat findings.