MITRE ATT&CKtechnique
T1675 ESXi Administration Command
- Domain
- enterprise
- Tactics
- Execution
- Platforms
- ESXi
- Version
- 1.0
- Created
- 2025-03-28
Description
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.
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`. This may enable follow-on behaviors on the guest VMs, such as File and Directory Discovery, Data from Local System, or OS Credential Dumping.
Related
Tactic · MITRE ATT&CK (1)
- TA0002 Execution tactic
Referenced by MITRE ATT&CK · mitigates (1)
- M1018 User Account Management mitigation
References
- https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/vmware-esxi-zero-day-bypass/ Google Cloud Threat Intelligence VMWare ESXi Zero-Day 2023
- 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 Broadcom Running Guest OS Operations
- 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 Broadcom VMware Tools Services