elastic / elastic/roadmap

Kill Process with Descendants

Open
#256 0 comments 0 reactions 1 assignee Claimed by @raqueltabuyo View on GitHub
Component: Elastic Cloud Hosted Component: Elastic Cloud Serverless product-area:security
Dominant language
No language data
Stars
6
Forks
1
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

## Kill Process with Descendants

**Value proposition**
In real-world attacks, malicious processes routinely spawn child and grandchild processes that continue executing after the parent is killed, leaving orphaned threats active on the endpoint. This epic extends the `kill-process` response action with the option to also kill the descendants, enabling analysts and detection rules to terminate entire process trees in a single operation, closing this gap in containment coverage.

**Expected outcome**

- Analysts can kill a process and all its recursive descendants from the Response Console in a single action
- Detection engineers can configure automated response actions in detection rules to kill full process trees without manual intervention
- Partial failures are surfaced clearly — showing which processes were killed, which failed, and why — so analysts can assess residual risk
- All termination attempts are logged in Response Actions History for auditability and compliance purposes

**Key user stories / use cases**

**As a** Security Analyst,
**I want to** kill a malicious process and all of its descendant processes from the Response Console,
**so that** no orphaned malicious processes continue running on the endpoint after containment.

**As a** Detection Engineer,
**I want to** configure an automated response action that kills a process tree,
**so that** multi-stage malware is reliably contained without requiring manual intervention.

**As a** SOC Lead / Auditor,
**I want to** see detailed logs of all descendant process termination attempts,
**so that** response actions are transparent, explainable, and auditable for compliance purposes.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Assessment

This issue has not been assessed yet.

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.