Suspicious CoinMiner KillProc Termination of Competing Miners (via process_creation)

PremiumReviewedSigma · Medium · v1
Product
windows
Category
process_creation
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-05-03
Updated
2026-08-28

ATT&CK techniques

Impact
  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Initial Access

  4. Execution

  5. Persistence

  6. Priv Esc

  7. Defense Evasion

  8. Cred Access

  9. Discovery

  10. Lateral Movement

  11. Collection

  12. C2

  13. Exfiltration

What it detects

This rule detects termination of competing mining processes such as phoenixminer, ethdcrminer64, or geekminer which the T-Rex CoinMiner campaign performs to monopolize GPU resources. Killing rival miner executables is a distinctive impact stage behavior.

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Malicious Massive Services Deletion Burst (via process_creation)
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Suspicious GhostLocker Watchdog Process Execution (via process_creation)
Malicious ESXi Virtual Machine Termination and Snapshot Removal via esxcli and vim-cmd (via process_creation)
Malicious ESXi Virtual Machine Termination via esxcli (via process_creation)
Suspicious CoinMiner KillProc Termination of Competing Miners (via process_creation)
Pivot detection · T1489 · 9 related

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