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)

Malicious Shadow Copy Deletion via WMIC via Process Creation (via process_creation)

Suspicious Anti-Recovery Zeroing via fsutil setZeroData (via process_creation)

Malicious Shadow Copy Removal via WMI PowerShell

Malicious Volume Shadow Copy Deletion via vssadmin

Malicious Inhibit System Recovery via Shadow Copy and Boot Config Tampering (via process_creation)

Malicious Recovery Disablement via Bcdedit RecoveryEnabled No

Suspicious Volume Shadow Copy Deletion via vssadmin or wmic

Malicious System Recovery Inhibition via bcdedit and wbadmin before Ransomware (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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