CHAIN-133 — AKS cluster autoscaler unrestricted — DoS via pod spam

Summary

Severity: Low · Likelihood: Medium · Logic: ALL

Why this chain matters

Cluster autoscaler has no upper node-count limit and pod QoS has no ResourceQuota. A tenant-scoped attacker creates thousands of pending pods; cluster scales out to absorb them, generating a huge Azure bill.

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_021	Trigger
zt_wl_012	Trigger

Attack walkthrough

Step 1 — kubectl create -f thousand-pods.yaml.

Actor: Authorised tenant
MITRE ATT&CK: T1496
Enabled by: zt_wl_021

Attacker gain: Autoscaler adds nodes.

Step 2 — Sustain load; financial damage + noisy-neighbor DoS.

Actor: Attacker
MITRE ATT&CK: T1496
Enabled by: zt_wl_012

Attacker gain: Cost attack + legitimate tenant DoS.

Blast radius

Initial access	Any kubectl create permission.
Max privilege	Resource exhaustion / financial harm.
Data at risk	Cluster availability for others
Services at risk	Multi-tenant cluster

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.