MITRE ATT&CKtechnique

T1675 ESXi Administration Command

Published 2025-03-28 Modified 2025-04-16 Official page ↗
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)

Referenced by MITRE ATT&CK · mitigates (1)

  • M1018 User Account Management mitigation

Referenced by MITRE ATT&CK · uses (3)

  • S9051 The Gentlemen Ransomware software (malware)
  • S1217 VIRTUALPITA software (malware)
  • G1048 UNC3886 group

References