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Every technique
T1546.005Detection written

Trap

Privilege Escalation · PersistencemacOS, Linux

Where this stands

One published detection covers this technique. Every one is unverified — no rule on Siemphony has been executed against real telemetry.

What the technique is

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. Adversaries can use this to register code to be executed when the shell encounters specific interrupts as a persistence mechanism. Trap commands are of the following format trap 'command list' signals where "command list" will be executed when "signals" are received.

Read it on attack.mitre.org

What MITRE says you would watch

  • AN1038

    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. Use contextual linking with user session activity to detect privilege misuse.

  • AN1039

    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.

Technique names and descriptions © MITRE ATT&CK®, CC BY 4.0. Not endorsed by MITRE.