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: 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: 100 (version history)

Added (Elastic Stack release): 7.16.0

Last modified (Elastic Stack release): 8.5.0

Rule authors: Elastic

Rule license: Elastic License v2

Potential false positivesedit

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

Investigation guideedit


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")

Threat mappingedit

Framework: MITRE ATT&CKTM

Rule version historyedit

Version 100 (8.5.0 release)
  • Formatting only
Version 4 (8.4.0 release)
  • Updated query, changed from:

    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")
Version 2 (8.2.0 release)
  • Formatting only