T1546.005sub-technique of T1546 Event Triggered Execution

Trap

macOS · Linuxnothing on this site yetT1546.005 on attack.mitre.org

Adversaries may establish persistence by executing malicious content triggered by an interrupt signal. The `trap` command allows programs and shells to specify commands that will be executed upon receiving interrupt signals. A common situation is a script allowing for graceful termination and handling of common keyboard interrupts like `ctrl+c` and `ctrl+d`.
MITRE ATT&CK 19.2, retrieved 2026-09-12

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.

Playbook for this stage

Cloud account compromise

Impossible travel, an unrecognised inbox rule, or a reported invoice-fraud attempt.

how MITRE says to see it

Detection Strategy for Event Triggered Execution via Trap (T1546.005)

Correlate file modifications in shell startup scripts (e.g.,.bashrc,.profile) with embedded `trap` commands and observe if those changes are followed by the unexpected execution of child processes when terminal signals (e.g., SIGINT) are triggered.
Detect unauthorized `trap` command registrations in shell startup files (e.g.,.zprofile,.bash_profile,.zshrc) followed by execution chains during user terminal interaction. Use Unified Logs and EDR telemetry to correlate shell command parsing and process tree anomalies.

the rest of T1546

T1546.001 Change Default File Association · not covered yet
T1546.002 Screensaver · not covered yet
T1546.003 Windows Management Instrumentation Event Subscription · 5 on this site
T1546.004 Unix Shell Configuration Modification · not covered yet
T1546.006 LC_LOAD_DYLIB Addition · not covered yet
T1546.007 Netsh Helper DLL · not covered yet
T1546.008 Accessibility Features · not covered yet
T1546.009 AppCert DLLs · not covered yet
T1546.010 AppInit DLLs · not covered yet
T1546.011 Application Shimming · not covered yet
T1546.012 Image File Execution Options Injection · not covered yet
T1546.013 PowerShell Profile · not covered yet
T1546.014 Emond · not covered yet
T1546.015 Component Object Model Hijacking · not covered yet
T1546.016 Installer Packages · not covered yet
T1546.017 Udev Rules · not covered yet
T1546.018 Python Startup Hooks · not covered yet

The description, detection analytics and mitigations are reproduced from MITRE ATT&CK, version 19.2, under its terms of use. The checklists, hunts, labs and everything else linked here are this site’s.