Malicious ESXi Virtual Machine Termination via esxcli Before Encryption

ATT&CK techniques

Impact

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

What it detects

This rule detects use of esxcli to forcibly kill running virtual machine processes on an ESXi host. RTM Locker ransomware enumerates and then force-kills all VMs with esxcli vm process kill -t=force before encrypting datastore files. Mass forced termination of virtual machines is a hallmark of Linux and ESXi ransomware preparing to maximize impact.

Reporting behind it

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

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Malicious Volume Shadow Copy Deletion via vssadmin

Malicious ESXi Virtual Machine Termination via esxcli Before Encryption

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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