Malicious Mass Hyper-V Virtual Machine Shutdown via PowerShell by Kraken Ransomware

ATT&CK techniques

Execution → Impact

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
- T1059.001PowerShell
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact
- T1490Inhibit System Recovery

What it detects

This rule detects PowerShell forcibly stopping Hyper-V virtual machines by piping Get-VM into Stop-VM with the force and turnoff switches. This technique is used by the Kraken ransomware group to shut down virtualized workloads before encryption. Terminating running virtual machines unlocks their files for encryption and maximizes operational impact.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1059.001 — drag to rearrange

Malicious Shadow Copy Deletion via WMI PowerShell

Malicious Shadow Copy Deletion Via WMI

Suspicious Hidden PowerShell Web Download via ClickFix Tactic

Malicious Volume Shadow Copy Deletion via wmic and vssadmin (via process_creation)

Malicious System Recovery Inhibition via bcdedit and vssadmin in Mallox

Malicious MS-SQL Server Spawning Command Shell via Mallox

Suspicious PowerShell Download Cradle to Blogspot (via process_creation)

Suspicious Script Host Spawning PowerShell Download Cradle (via process_creation)

Suspicious Renamed PowerShell Binary Execution (via process_creation)

Malicious Mass Hyper-V Virtual Machine Shutdown via PowerShell by Kraken Ransomware

Pivot detection · T1059.001 · 9 related

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

Full detection rule

Unlock this rule to view and copy it

The detection logic is included with a plan. Everything else — context, mappings and implementation details — stays free on this page.

Sign in for 3 free unlocks

Signing in gives you 3 unlocks to spend on any rule in the library. No card, and they do not expire.

Also included

Unlocked rules convert on this page — to Splunk SPL or Splunk — Raw Index SPL or Microsoft Sentinel KQL or Microsoft Sentinel ASIM ASIM KQL or Microsoft Defender XDR KQL or Elastic Security KQL or Elastic Security Lucene or Elastic Security ES|QL or CrowdStrike Falcon CQL or SentinelOne PowerQuery or Palo Alto Cortex XDR XQL or Carbon Black Cloud Platform Search or Carbon Black EDR Process Search or Google Security Operations UDM Search or IBM QRadar AQL or Sumo Logic Cloud SIEM Rules expression or Rapid7 InsightIDR LEQL or Graylog Search or OpenSearch Lucene or OpenSearch PPL PPL or Grafana Loki LogQL or SQLite SQL or Zircolite SQLite — with the log-source profile the engine picked, the field map it used, and everything it could not express. Converting a rule you have unlocked costs no further credit.

See it run on a free rule →Convert your own rule →