Virtual Machine Fingerprinting via Grepedit

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: 5m

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

Maximum alerts per execution: 100

References:

Tags:

  • Domain: Endpoint
  • OS: macOS
  • OS: Linux
  • Use Case: Threat Detection
  • Tactic: Discovery
  • Data Source: Elastic Defend

Version: 105

Rule authors:

  • Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Setupedit

Setup

If enabling an EQL rule on a non-elastic-agent index (such as beats) for versions <8.2, events will not define event.ingested and default fallback for EQL rules was not added until version 8.2. Hence for this rule to work effectively, users will need to add a custom ingest pipeline to populate event.ingested to @timestamp. For more details on adding a custom ingest pipeline refer - https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/fleet/current/data-streams-pipeline-tutorial.html

Rule queryedit

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")

Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM