Virtual Machine Fingerprinting via Grep

Last updated 7 months ago on 2025-01-15

Created 4 years ago on 2021-09-29

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: macOSOS: LinuxUse Case: Threat DetectionTactic: DiscoveryData Source: Elastic DefendLanguage: eql

Severity

medium

Risk Score

MITRE ATT&CK™

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

↳ System Information Discovery (T1082)(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(opens in a new tab or window)

Definition

Rule Type: Event Correlation Rule
Integration Pack: Prebuilt Security Detection Rules
Index Patterns: auditbeat-*logs-endpoint.events.*
Related Integrations: endpoint(opens in a new tab or window)
Query

process where event.type == "start" and
 process.name in ("grep", "egrep") and user.id != "0" and
 process.args : ("parallels*", "vmware*", "virtualbox*") and process.args : "Manufacturer*" and
 not process.parent.executable in ("/Applications/Docker.app/Contents/MacOS/Docker", "/usr/libexec/kcare/virt-what")

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect Virtual Machine Fingerprinting via Grep 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(opens in a new tab or window).