Suspicious ESXi Virtual Machine Enumeration via esxcli Process List

ATT&CK techniques

Discovery

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
- T1057Process Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects esxcli enumerating running virtual machine processes on an ESXi host. RTM Locker collects the output of esxcli vm process list into a temporary file to build a target list before force-killing and encrypting the VMs. VM process enumeration through esxcli immediately preceding termination is an early ransomware staging behavior.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1057 — drag to rearrange

Antivirus Software Discovery via tasklist and findstr

Suspicious Security Software Discovery via tasklist and findstr (via process_creation)

Suspicious Security Process Enumeration via Tasklist And Findstr

Linux sysinfo Syscall for System Information Discovery

Windows: Recon command output piped to findstr.exe

Windows Process Execution of PCHunter (PCHunter64.exe or PCHunter32.exe)

Windows PowerShell: Suspicious Process Discovery Using Get-Process

Windows WMIC Process Flag Execution Indicating Process Reconnaissance

Windows Process Discovery via tasklist Command Execution

Suspicious ESXi Virtual Machine Enumeration via esxcli Process List

Pivot detection · T1057 · 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 →