Abnormal Process Forking Leading to Resource Exhaustion

Detection of a rapid increase in the number of processes being forked by an unauthorized process, leading to excessive CPU and memory usage. This behavior is characteristic of a fork bomb, which is designed to exhaust system resources and lead to a system crash or freeze.

STIX Pattern

[process:image_ref.name != 'authorized_process' AND process:x_fork_count > 'threshold' AND process:x_cpu_usage > 'threshold' AND process:x_memory_usage > 'threshold']

SPARTA TTPs

ID Name Description
EX-0010 Malicious Code Threat actors may rely on other tactics and techniques in order to execute malicious code on the victim spacecraft. This can be done via compromising the supply chain or development environment in some capacity or taking advantage of known commands. However, once malicious code has been uploaded to the victim spacecraft, the threat actor can then trigger the code to run via a specific command or wait for a legitimate user to trigger it accidently. The code itself can do a number of different things to the hosted payload, subsystems, or underlying OS.