Malicious ESXi Virtual Machine Termination and Snapshot Removal

ATT&CK techniques

Impact

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact
- T1489Service Stop
- T1490Inhibit System Recovery

What it detects

This rule detects ESXi command-line activity that force-kills running virtual machines or removes all snapshots, the hypervisor sabotage Qilin ransomware performed via esxcli and vim-cmd before encryption. Mass termination of VMs and snapshot deletion inhibits recovery and is characteristic of ransomware targeting virtualized infrastructure.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1490 — drag to rearrange

Malicious ESXi Virtual Machine Termination and Snapshot Removal via esxcli and vim-cmd (via process_creation)

Suspicious Symbolic Link Evaluation Enabled via fsutil by RansomHub Ransomware

Suspicious Volume Shadow Copy Deletion via PowerShell WMI by Akira Ransomware

VSS Backup Deletion or Resize (via process_creation)

Malicious Boot Recovery Tampering via Bcdedit (via process_creation)

Malicious Massive Processes Termination Burst (via process_creation)

Malicious Inhibition of System Recovery via Shadow Copy or Backup Deletion (via process_creation)

Malicious Service Deactivation - Command (via process_creation)

Malicious Windows Native Backup Deletion (via process_creation)

Malicious ESXi Virtual Machine Termination and Snapshot Removal

Pivot detection · T1490 · 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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