Virtual Machine Fingerprinting

Last updated 2 months ago on 2025-12-18
Created 6 years ago on 2020-04-27

About

An adversary may attempt to get detailed information about the operating system and hardware. This rule identifies common locations used to discover virtual machine hardware by a non-root user. This technique has been used by the Pupy RAT and other malware.
Tags
Domain: EndpointOS: LinuxUse Case: Threat DetectionTactic: DiscoveryData Source: Elastic EndgameData Source: Elastic DefendData Source: CrowdstrikeData Source: SentinelOneLanguage: eql
Severity
high
Risk Score
73
MITRE ATT&CK™

Discovery (TA0007)(external, opens in a new tab or window)

False Positive Examples
Certain tools or automated software may enumerate hardware information. These tools can be exempted via user name or process arguments to eliminate potential noise.
License
Elastic License v2(external, opens in a new tab or window)

Definition

Rule Type
Event Correlation Rule
Integration Pack
Prebuilt Security Detection Rules
Index Patterns
auditbeat-*endgame-*logs-endpoint.events.*logs-crowdstrike.fdr*logs-sentinel_one_cloud_funnel.*logs-auditd_manager.auditd-*
Related Integrations

endpoint(external, opens in a new tab or window)

crowdstrike(external, opens in a new tab or window)

sentinel_one_cloud_funnel(external, opens in a new tab or window)

auditd_manager(external, opens in a new tab or window)

Query
text code block:
process where host.os.type == "linux" and event.type == "start" and event.action in ("exec", "exec_event", "start", "ProcessRollup2", "process_started") and process.args in ( "/sys/class/dmi/id/bios_version", "/sys/class/dmi/id/product_name", "/sys/class/dmi/id/chassis_vendor", "/proc/scsi/scsi", "/proc/ide/hd0/model" ) and not ( user.name == "root" or ?process.parent.name in ("LinkManager.exe", "saposcol", "svc_snow_discovery") or ?process.working_directory == "/home/qualys" or ?process.parent.executable in ( "/usr/sara/sbin/sys2prometheus", "/usr/sara/sbin/sys2ganglia", "/usr/libexec/valgrind/memcheck-amd64-linux", "/var/lib/cfengine3/modules/init_node", "/opt/emby-server/system/EmbyServer" ) )

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect Virtual Machine Fingerprinting in the Elastic Security detection engine by installing this rule into your Elastic Stack.

To setup this rule, check out the installation guide for Prebuilt Security Detection Rules(external, opens in a new tab or window).