On January 25, 2022, Qualys announced the discovery of a local privilege escalation vulnerability that it identified as PwnKit. The PwnKit vulnerability affects PolicyKit’s pkexec, a SUID-root program installed by default on many Linux distributions. The same day of the announcement, a proof of concept (PoC) exploit was built and published by the security research community.

A core challenge for threat detection engineering is reproducing common attacker behavior. Several open source and commercial projects exist for traditional endpoint and on-premise security, but there is a clear need for a cloud-native tool built with cloud providers and infrastructure in mind. To meet this growing demand, we’re happy to announce Stratus Red Team, an open source project created to emulate common attack techniques directly in your cloud environment.