Hide Artifacts: Run Virtual Instance T1564.006
Tactic: Stealth
Adversaries may carry out malicious operations using a virtual instance to avoid detection. A wide variety of virtualization technologies exist that allow for the emulation of a computer or computing environment. By running malicious code inside of a virtual instance, adversaries can hide artifacts associated with their behavior from security tools that are unable to monitor activity inside the virtual instance. Additionally, depending on the virtual networking implementation (ex: bridged adapter), network traffic generated by the virtual instance can be difficult to trace back to the compromised host as the IP address and hostname might not match known values.
Events covered
7 catalog events are tagged with this technique by at least one rule.
| Provider | Event | Title |
|---|---|---|
| Sysmon | Event ID 1 | Process creation |
| Security-Auditing | Event ID 4624 | An account was successfully logged on. |
| Security-Auditing | Event ID 4625 | An account failed to log on. |
| Security-Auditing | Event ID 4688 | A new process has been created. |
| Security-Auditing | Event ID 4776 | The domain controller attempted to validate the credentials for an account. |
| PowerShell | Event ID 4103 | Payload Context: ContextInfo User Data: UserData. |
| PowerShell | Event ID 4104 | Creating Scriptblock text (MessageNumber of MessageTotal). |
Authoring guide
Patterns shared across the 9 rules above: which fields they filter on, what specific values they look for, and what they exclude. The catalog normalizes field names across vendors so Sigma's Image, Elastic's process.name, and Splunk's process_name collapse into one row. Each rule contributes at most once per row.
Fields filtered most (13 distinct)
The fields most rules look at when detecting this technique. The How column shows the operators authors use (eq, wildcard, regex_match, match) and how often each appears. Sample values are concrete examples to start from, not an exhaustive list.
Top indicator values (39 distinct)
Specific (field, operator, value) combinations the rules check for, ranked by how many rules under this technique use each one. The Corpus reach column counts how many rules across the entire catalog (any technique) check the same combination. High numbers point to widely-used indicators that are likely noisy on their own; combine them with another condition for useful signal. Blank means the combination is specific to rules under this technique. Click a value to expand the rules under this technique that use it.
Rules under this technique
Every rule in the catalog tagged with this technique, grouped by vendor. Click a rule title for its full predicates, exclusions, and indicators.
Sigma 6 rules
- Detection of default a Windows host name in login attempts
- Suspicious Hyper-V Cmdlets
- Virtualbox Driver Installation or Starting of VMs
- Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) installation (command)
- Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) installation (PowerShell)
- Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) package turned on (native)