ATT&CK coverage › Technique

Hide Artifacts: Run Virtual Instance T1564.006

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

3 catalog events are tagged with this technique by at least one rule.

ProviderEvent IDTitle
Sysmon1Process creation
Security-Auditing4688A new process has been created.
PowerShell4104Creating Scriptblock text (MessageNumber of MessageTotal).

Authoring guide

Patterns shared across the 2 rules above: which fields they filter on, what specific values they look for, and what they exclude. Field names are normalized 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 (2 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.

FieldRulesHowSample values
ScriptBlockText1match 1Start-VM, New-VM, Set-VMFirmware
CommandLine1match 1controlvm, VBoxDrv.sys, VBoxC.dll

Top indicator values (8 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.

FieldKindValueRules (here)Corpus reach
ScriptBlockTextmatchSet-VMFirmware1
ScriptBlockTextmatchNew-VM1
ScriptBlockTextmatchStart-VM1
CommandLinematchVBoxC.dll1
CommandLinematchcontrolvm1
CommandLinematchVBoxRT.dll,RTR3Init1
CommandLinematchstartvm1
CommandLinematchVBoxDrv.sys1

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 2 rules