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T1552.003 Shell History

Adversaries may search the command history on compromised systems for insecurely stored credentials.

On Linux and macOS systems, shells such as Bash and Zsh keep track of the commands users type on the command-line with the “history” utility. Once a user logs out, the history is flushed to the user’s history file. For each user, this file resides at the same location: for example, ~/.bash_history or ~/.zsh_history. Typically, these files keeps track of the user’s last 1000 commands.

On Windows, PowerShell has both a command history that is wiped after the session ends, and one that contains commands used in all sessions and is persistent. The default location for persistent history can be found in %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\PowerShell\PSReadline\ConsoleHost_history.txt, but command history can also be accessed with Get-History. Command Prompt (CMD) on Windows does not have persistent history.32

Users often type usernames and passwords on the command-line as parameters to programs, which then get saved to this file when they log out. Adversaries can abuse this by looking through the file for potential credentials.1

Item Value
ID T1552.003
Sub-techniques T1552.001, T1552.002, T1552.003, T1552.004, T1552.005, T1552.006, T1552.007, T1552.008
Tactics TA0006
Platforms Linux, Windows, macOS
Version 2.0
Created 04 February 2020
Last Modified 24 October 2025

Procedure Examples

ID Name Description
S0599 Kinsing Kinsing has searched bash_history for credentials.4

Mitigations

ID Mitigation Description
M1028 Operating System Configuration There are multiple methods of preventing a user’s command history from being flushed to their .bash_history file, including use of the following commands:
set +o history and set -o history to start logging again;
unset HISTFILE being added to a user’s .bash_rc file; and
ln -s /dev/null ~/.bash_history to write commands to /dev/null instead.

References

  1. Alex Rymdeko-Harvey, Steve Borosh. (2016, May 14). External to DA, the OS X Way. Retrieved September 12, 2024. ↩

  2. Michael Koczwara. (2021, March 14). Windows privilege escalation via PowerShell History. Retrieved June 13, 2025. ↩

  3. Microsoft. (2024, January 19). about_History. Retrieved June 13, 2025. ↩

  4. Singer, G. (2020, April 3). Threat Alert: Kinsing Malware Attacks Targeting Container Environments. Retrieved April 1, 2021. ↩