T1675Techniqueexecution

T1675ESXi Administration Command

Platforms: ESXi

ATT&CK version: v19.1

What it is

Adversaries may abuse ESXi administration services to execute commands on guest machines hosted within an ESXi virtual environment. Persistent background services on ESXi-hosted VMs, such as the VMware Tools Daemon Service, allow for remote management from the ESXi server. The tools daemon service runs as `vmtoolsd.exe` on Windows guest operating systems, `vmware-tools-daemon` on macOS, and `vmtoolsd ` on Linux.(Citation: Broadcom VMware Tools Services) Adversaries may leverage a variety of tools to execute commands on ESXi-hosted VMs – for example, by using the vSphere Web Services SDK to programmatically execute commands and scripts via APIs such as `StartProgramInGuest`, `ListProcessesInGuest`, `ListFileInGuest`, and `InitiateFileTransferFromGuest`.(Citation: Google Cloud Threat Intelligence VMWare ESXi Zero-Day 2023)(Citation: Broadcom Running Guest OS Operations) This may enable follow-on behaviors on the guest VMs, such as [File and Directory Discovery](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1083), [Data from Local System](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1005), or [OS Credential Dumping](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1003).

ATT&CK tactics· 1

Execution

References

  1. https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1675
  2. https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/vmware-esxi-zero-day-bypass/
  3. https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vsphere/vsphere-sdks-tools/8-0/web-services-sdk-programming-guide/virtual-machine-guest-operations/running-guest-os-operations.html
  4. https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vsphere/tools/12-4-0/vmware-tools-administration-12-4-0/introduction-to-vmware-tools/vmware-tools-service.html
Sourced from MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise v14.1. Curated and contextualized for EU compliance use cases by Adam Lundqvist, Founder at SQUR.