Malicious vmanage-admin Public Key Authentication in SSH Auth Log

ATT&CK techniques

Persistence → Lateral Movement

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
- T1098.004SSH Authorized Keys
Priv Esc
- T1098.004SSH Authorized Keys
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
- T1021.004SSH
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects SSH authentication events accepting a public key for the vmanage-admin account, an indicator of post-exploitation persistence on Cisco SD-WAN appliances following CVE-2026-20127. Adversaries add their own SSH key and authenticate as vmanage-admin to maintain root-equivalent access and pivot between appliances. Unexpected vmanage-admin key logins from unknown sources signal compromise.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1021.004 — drag to rearrange

Suspicious SSH authorized_keys Modification for Persistence

Malicious Immutable Attribute Set on SSH Authorized Keys via chattr on Linux

Malicious Bad Apples Remote Apple Events Lateral Movement via osascript

Suspicious OpenSSH Reverse Tunnel Over HTTPS Port (Chaos Ransomware)

Suspicious Automated SSH Lateral Movement with Batch Mode (via process_creation)

Suspicious SSH authorized_keys Persistence Modification (via process_creation)

OpenSSH Native Server Feature Installation (via powershell)

OpenSSH Server Listening on Socket (via openssh)

Malicious EtherRAT SSH authorized_keys Backdoor Injection via Shell (via process_creation)

Malicious vmanage-admin Public Key Authentication in SSH Auth Log

Pivot detection · T1021.004 · 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 →