Malicious ESX Admins Domain Group Creation via Process Creation

ATT&CK techniques

Persistence → Priv Esc

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
- T1098Account Manipulation
Priv Esc
- T1068Exploitation for Privilege Escalation
- T1098Account Manipulation
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects creation of or membership changes to a domain group named ESX Admins using net.exe, the core exploitation step for CVE-2024-37085 in which ESXi hypervisors grant full administrative access to any member of that group. Multiple ransomware operators created this group to obtain hypervisor admin rights and mass-encrypt virtual machines.

Reporting behind it

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Malicious ESX Admins Domain Group Creation via Process Creation

Pivot detection · T1098 · 9 related

Detection content is published as a reviewed draft. Tune thresholds and exclusions against your own telemetry before enabling this rule for alerting.

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