KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020

As security practices and tools for scanning container images are becoming increasingly popular, malicious actors are introducing sophisticated techniques to obfuscate their intent and evade scanning tools. The malware they plant cannot be detected using static analysis, or based on signatures. But dynamic analysis that runs the image, and then traces the activity of the running container can detect and document the entire multi-stage attack.

In this talk, we will review the evolution of these attacks as observed by Aqua’s security research team, and demonstrate the full chain of events and IoCs (indicators if compromise) that were detected. We will give practical advice on what developers and cluster admins should do to detect similar techniques, and the security controls the should be employed to reduce the chances of such an attack succeeding, as well as reduce its potential impact.