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

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 the ESXi shell loops used by Lynx ransomware to force-kill running virtual machines with esxcli vm process kill and to remove all snapshots with vim-cmd snapshot.removeall as described by Group-IB. Adversaries stop VMs and delete snapshots to enable datastore encryption and inhibit recovery on hypervisors, making this a strong pre-encryption signal.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1490 — drag to rearrange

Malicious ESXi Virtual Machine Termination and Snapshot Removal

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 via esxcli and vim-cmd (via process_creation)

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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