T1673 — Virtual Machine Discovery

# T1673 - Virtual Machine Discovery

## SOC Recommendation
Investigate Virtual Machine Discovery activity in the context of Discovery: confirm scope, affected host/identity, and whether it matches expected administrative behaviour before deciding this is benign.

## D3FEND Mappings
| D3FEND Technique | Relationship | Practical SOC Action |
|---|---|---|
| Network Traffic Analysis | Detect | Monitor for Network Traffic Analysis indicators relevant to this technique. |

## Investigation Steps
1. Review Defender for Endpoint / Defender XDR alerts and timeline for the affected host or identity.
2. Check Sentinel analytics rules and incidents correlated with this technique.
3. Review Entra ID sign-in and audit logs if the technique involves an identity or cloud resource.

## Evidence to Collect
- Host or resource affected
- Account or identity involved
- Timestamp of the activity
- Related process, file, or network artifact
- Any preceding or follow-on alerts

## Response Actions
| Action | Risk | Automation Safe | Approval Required |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contain the affected host or account | Medium | No | Yes |
| Collect and preserve evidence | Low | Yes | No |

## KQL
```kql
DeviceEvents
| where TimeGenerated > ago(24h)
| where ActionType has "<tune to T1673>"
```

## Escalation Criteria
- Virtual Machine Discovery activity observed on a privileged account or critical system.
- Activity follows or precedes other suspicious behaviour in the same investigation.
- Automated triage cannot confidently rule out malicious intent.

## False Positive Considerations
- Legitimate administrative or maintenance activity matching this pattern.
- Approved security testing or red team exercise.
- Known benign software producing similar telemetry.

Generated by SOC Response Atlas by Basyrix.

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• /api/techniques/T1673.json
• /api/recommendations/T1673.json
• /api/d3fend/T1673.json
• /api/mappings/T1673.json
• /api/confluence/T1673.md

Example curl:

curl https://atlas.basyrix.com/api/recommendations/T1673.json

Response:

{
  "technique_id": "T1673",
  "name": "Virtual Machine Discovery",
  "priority": "high",
  "status": "draft",
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "last_reviewed": "2026-07-23",
  "generated_by": "SOC Response Atlas by Basyrix",
  "tactics": [
    "Discovery"
  ],
  "platforms": [
    "ESXi",
    "Linux",
    "macOS",
    "Windows"
  ],
  "summary": "An adversary may attempt to enumerate running virtual machines (VMs) after gaining access to a host or hypervisor. For example, adversaries may enumerate a list of VMs on an ESXi hypervisor using a [Hypervisor CLI](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1059/012) such as `esxcli` or `vim-cmd` (e.g. `esxcli vm process list or vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms`). Adversaries may also directly leverage a graphical user interface, such as VMware vCenter, in order to view virtual machines on a host...",
  "soc_recommendation": "Investigate Virtual Machine Discovery activity in the context of Discovery: confirm scope, affected host/identity, and whether it matches expected administrative behaviour before deciding this is benign.",
  "d3fend_mappings": [
    {
      "id": "D3-NTA",
      "name": "Network Traffic Analysis",
      "relationship": "detect",
      "practical_action": "Monitor for Network Traffic Analysis indicators relevant to this technique.",
      "tooling": [
        "Sentinel",
        "Defender for Endpoint"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "investigation_steps": {
    "microsoft": [
      "Review Defender for Endpoint / Defender XDR alerts and timeline for the affected host or identity.",
      "Check Sentinel analytics rules and incidents correlated with this technique.",
      "Review Entra ID sign-in and audit logs if the technique involves an identity or cloud resource."
    ],
    "generic": [
      "Confirm whether the observed virtual machine discovery activity matches expected administrative or application behaviour.",
      "Identify the host, account, or resource where the activity occurred and its business criticality.",
      "Check for related alerts before and after this activity to reconstruct the broader intrusion timeline.",
      "Real detection reference: \"Entra ID Sign-in BloodHound Suite User-Agent Detected\" -- Identifies potential enumeration activity using AzureHound, SharpHound, or BloodHound across Microsoft cloud services. These tools are often used by red teamers and adversaries to map users, groups, roles, applications, and access relationships within Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) and Microsoft 365."
    ]
  },
  "evidence_to_collect": [
    "Host or resource affected",
    "Account or identity involved",
    "Timestamp of the activity",
    "Related process, file, or network artifact",
    "Any preceding or follow-on alerts"
  ],
  "response_actions": [
    {
      "name": "Contain the affected host or account",
      "category": "Containment",
      "risk": "Medium",
      "automation_safe": false,
      "approval_required": true,
      "tool": "Defender for Endpoint / Entra ID",
      "notes": "Requires approval -- confirm malicious intent before isolating a host or disabling an account."
    },
    {
      "name": "Collect and preserve evidence",
      "category": "Investigation",
      "risk": "Low",
      "automation_safe": true,
      "approval_required": false,
      "tool": "Defender for Endpoint",
      "notes": "Safe -- read-only evidence collection."
    }
  ],
  "queries": {
    "kql": [
      {
        "name": "Starting point for T1673",
        "description": "Generic starting query -- tune to the specific data source relevant to this technique.",
        "query": "DeviceEvents\n| where TimeGenerated > ago(24h)\n| where ActionType has \"<tune to T1673>\""
      }
    ],
    "spl": [],
    "esql": [
      {
        "name": "c28750fa-4092-11f0-aca6-f661ea17fbcd — Entra ID Sign-in BloodHound Suite User-Agent Detected",
        "description": "(EQL) Identifies potential enumeration activity using AzureHound, SharpHound, or BloodHound across Microsoft cloud services. These tools are often used by red teamers and adversaries to map users, groups, roles, applications, and access relationships within Microsoft Entra ID (Azure AD) and Microsoft 365. (Source: Elastic's official detection-rules repository (Elastic License v2).)",
        "query": "any where data_stream.dataset : (\n    \"azure.activitylogs\",\n    \"azure.graphactivitylogs\",\n    \"azure.auditlogs\",\n    \"azure.signinlogs\",\n    \"o365.audit\"\n) and user_agent.original regex~ \"(azure|sharp|blood)(hound)/.*\""
      },
      {
        "name": "f541ca3a-5752-11f0-b44b-f661ea17fbcd — Entra ID Sign-in TeamFiltration User-Agent Detected",
        "description": "(KUERY) Identifies potential enumeration or password spraying activity using TeamFiltration tool. TeamFiltration is an open-source enumeration, password spraying and exfiltration tool designed for Entra ID and Microsoft 365... (Source: Elastic's official detection-rules repository (Elastic License v2).)",
        "query": "data_stream.dataset:(\"azure.signinlogs\" or \"o365.audit\")\n    and ((user_agent.name:\"Electron\" and user_agent.os.name:\"Windows\" and user_agent.version:\"8.5.1\") or\n    user_agent.original:\"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Teams/1.3.00.30866 Chrome/80.0.3987.165 Electron/8.5.1 Safari/537.36\")"
      }
    ]
  },
  "automation": {
    "safe": [
      "Add recommendation as Sentinel incident comment.",
      "Run enrichment queries.",
      "Create ServiceNow SecOps task."
    ],
    "approval_required": [
      "Contain or disable the affected host/account.",
      "Any change to production configuration."
    ]
  },
  "escalation_criteria": [
    "Virtual Machine Discovery activity observed on a privileged account or critical system.",
    "Activity follows or precedes other suspicious behaviour in the same investigation.",
    "Automated triage cannot confidently rule out malicious intent."
  ],
  "false_positive_considerations": [
    "Legitimate administrative or maintenance activity matching this pattern.",
    "Approved security testing or red team exercise.",
    "Known benign software producing similar telemetry."
  ],
  "confluence": {
    "title": "T1673 - Virtual Machine Discovery Response Guidance",
    "labels": [
      "mitre",
      "attack",
      "d3fend",
      "secops",
      "basyrix"
    ],
    "sections": [
      "summary",
      "d3fend_mappings",
      "investigation_steps",
      "response_actions",
      "queries",
      "automation",
      "escalation_criteria",
      "false_positive_considerations"
    ]
  }
}