Virtual Machine Fingerprinting via Grep

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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.

Rule type: eql

Rule indices:

  • auditbeat-*
  • logs-endpoint.events.*

Severity: medium

Risk score: 47

Runs every: 5 minutes

Searches indices from: now-9m (Date Math format, see also Additional look-back time)

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

References:

Tags:

  • Elastic
  • Host
  • macOS
  • Linux
  • Threat Detection
  • Discovery

Version: 1

Added (Elastic Stack release): 7.16.0

Rule authors: Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Potential false positives

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Certain tools or automated software may enumerate hardware information. These tools can be exempted via user name or process arguments to eliminate potential noise.

Rule query

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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")

Threat mapping

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Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM