CHAIN-121 — AKS private cluster with unrestricted egress

Summary

Severity: Medium · Likelihood: Medium · Logic: ALL

Why this chain matters

AKS is private (no public API server) but the cluster's egress firewall allows any outbound destination. A compromised pod can exfiltrate or call out to C2 freely, and the 'private cluster' label gives the security team a false sense of containment.

Component rules

This chain fires when its trigger conditions are met by the following rules. Click any rule to see its detection logic and compliance mappings.

Rule ID	Role
zt_wl_005	Trigger
zt_net_024	Trigger

Attack walkthrough

Step 1 — Establish outbound C2 tunnel through unrestricted NAT.

Actor: Compromised pod
MITRE ATT&CK: T1071.001
Enabled by: zt_wl_005

Attacker gain: Live C2 channel.

Step 2 — Exfil cluster secrets, node identity tokens.

Actor: Attacker
MITRE ATT&CK: T1041
Enabled by: zt_net_024

Attacker gain: Pod-level secret extraction

Blast radius

Initial access	Any pod compromise.
Max privilege	Egress to attacker infrastructure.
Data at risk	Pod memory, service account tokens
Services at risk	AKS cluster secrets

How the logic works

The chain fires only when every rule above has at least one finding in the current scan. Missing any one rule breaks the chain — so remediating any single step disrupts the attack path.