Resource Hijacking: Bandwidth Hijacking

Adversaries may leverage the network bandwidth resources of co-opted systems to complete resource-intensive tasks, which may impact system and/or hosted service availability.

Adversaries may also use malware that leverages a system's network bandwidth as part of a botnet in order to facilitate Network Denial of Service campaigns and/or to seed malicious torrents.[1] Alternatively, they may engage in proxyjacking by selling use of the victims' network bandwidth and IP address to proxyware services.[2] Finally, they may engage in internet-wide scanning in order to identify additional targets for compromise.[3]

In addition to incurring potential financial costs or availability disruptions, this technique may cause reputational damage if a victim’s bandwidth is used for illegal activities.[2]

ID: T1496.002
Sub-technique of:  T1496
Tactic: Impact
Platforms: Containers, IaaS, Linux, Windows, macOS
Impact Type: Availability
Version: 1.0
Created: 25 September 2024
Last Modified: 15 April 2025

Mitigations

This type of attack technique cannot be easily mitigated with preventive controls since it is based on the abuse of system features.

Detection Strategy

ID Name Analytic ID Analytic Description
DET0028 Detect Excessive or Unauthorized Bandwidth Usage for Botnet, Proxyjacking, or Scanning Purposes AN0080

Processes invoking network-intensive child processes or uploading large data volumes, often from non-standard user or system contexts, with evidence of long-duration TCP/UDP sessions to unusual destinations.

AN0081

User-initiated processes generating sustained outbound traffic over common or non-standard ports, often outside business hours, potentially linked to scanning or proxyjacking. Includes curl, wget, masscan, or proxy clients.

AN0082

Suspicious long-lived or high-throughput connections by non-Apple signed apps or processes not commonly associated with network uploads. Detect background processes using open sockets for data egress.

AN0083

Containerized apps or sidecar containers generating excessive outbound traffic or being leveraged for proxy networks. Includes sudden increases in network interface stats, especially in dormant or low-util apps.

AN0084

Virtual instances or workloads generating sustained outbound data rates, often to TOR, VPN, or proxy endpoints. Often coincides with unusual IAM usage or deployed scripts (e.g., cron jobs using proxy clients).

References