Suspicious Competing Cryptominer Termination via killall

ATT&CK techniques

Impact

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact
- T1496Resource Hijacking

What it detects

This rule detects a process forcibly terminating xmrig and other known miner processes, a hallmark of cryptomining campaigns that remove competing miners before deploying their own. In the Log4j XMRig campaign this preparation step precedes installation of the c3pool miner for resource hijacking.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1496 — drag to rearrange

Malicious XMRig Miner Installation via c3pool Setup Script

Suspicious Hosts File Modification Pointing to Mining Pool via Command Line (via process_creation)

Suspicious Fake vSphere Service Installation with SELinux Disable via Command Line (via process_creation)

Suspicious MSR Kernel Module Loading for Cryptomining Optimization via Command Line (via process_creation)

Malicious CreativeUpdate Cryptominer Execution via mdworker Path (via process_creation)

Malicious Cryptominer Execution via AddInProcess with XMRig Arguments (via process_creation)

Malicious Cryptocurrency Miner Execution via XMRig and c3pool (via process_creation)

Malicious WinRing0 Vulnerable Driver Load for Coin Mining

Suspicious Power Configuration Change to Prevent Sleep via powercfg

Suspicious Competing Cryptominer Termination via killall

Pivot detection · T1496 · 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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