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.[1]
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.[2],[3] This may enable follow-on behaviors on the guest VMs, such as File and Directory Discovery, Data from Local System, or OS Credential Dumping.
References
- Broadcom. (n.d.). VMware Tools Services. Retrieved March 28, 2025.
- Alexander Marvi, Brad Slaybaugh, Ron Craft, and Rufus Brown. (2023, June 13). VMware ESXi Zero-Day Used by Chinese Espionage Actor to Perform Privileged Guest Operations on Compromised Hypervisors. Retrieved March 26, 2025.
- Broadcom. (n.d.). Running Guest OS Operations. Retrieved March 28, 2025.
Gekoppelde issues
| Koppelingstype | Issue |
|---|---|
| is related to | Techniques |
| is blocked by | Detection Strategy for ESXi Administration Command |
| is blocked by | User Account Management |
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