Suspicious WARP PANDA BRICKSTORM Backdoor Masquerading as vCenter Process (via process_creation)

PremiumReviewedSigma · Medium · v1
Product
linux
Category
process_creation
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-09-13
Updated
2026-09-13

ATT&CK techniques

Defense Evasion
  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Initial Access

  4. Execution

  5. Persistence

  6. Priv Esc

  7. Cred Access

  8. Discovery

  9. Lateral Movement

  10. Collection

  11. C2

  12. Exfiltration

  13. Impact

What it detects

This rule detects a shell being spawned by a process masquerading as the VMware vCenter management binaries updatemgr or vami-http. WARP PANDA deployed the BRICKSTORM Golang backdoor under these legitimate process names on appliances to blend in while executing commands. A vCenter management process launching an interactive shell is anomalous.

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Suspicious Service Creation Masquerading as FortiGateUpdate (via process_creation)
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Pivot detection · T1036.004 · 9 related

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