T1525
Implant Internal Image
IaaS · Containersnothing on this site yetT1525 on attack.mitre.org
Adversaries may implant cloud or container images with malicious code to establish persistence after gaining access to an environment. Amazon Web Services (AWS) Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Images, and Azure Images as well as popular container runtimes such as Docker can be implanted or backdoored. Unlike Upload Malware, this technique focuses on adversaries implanting an image in a registry within a victim’s environment.
If this is happening now
Checklists and playbooks to open while the alert is still live.
Playbook for this stage
Suspicious execution on an endpoint
An EDR alert, an unexplained process, or a user reporting something odd.
how MITRE says to see it
Detection Strategy for T1525 – Implant Internal Image
- Implantation of malicious code into container images followed by registry push and use in new deployments.
- Creation or modification of cloud virtual machine images (AMIs, custom images) with persistence mechanisms, followed by infrastructure provisioning that uses these implanted images.
what reduces it
- M1045 Code Signing. Several cloud service providers support content trust models that require container images be signed by trusted sources.
- M1026 Privileged Account Management. Limit permissions associated with creating and modifying platform images or containers based on the principle of least privilege.
- M1047 Audit. Periodically check the integrity of images and containers used in cloud deployments to ensure they have not been modified to include malicious software.