[Sygnia]Fire Ant: A Chinese Espionage Group Operating Beneath the Hypervisor
DAY 1
11:20-
11:50
Virtualization platforms have long been the backbone of enterprise infrastructure, but they have become the new playground for nation-state espionage groups. What ransomware operators once treated as the “finish line” for maximum disruption has now evolved into a highway for persistence, privilege escalation, and stealthy lateral movement.
In this session, Sygnia will present a deep-dive case study of Fire Ant, a China-nexus threat actor we tracked during several incident response engagements. The talk will unfold as a technical thriller - beginning with a strange alert inside a guest VM and leading investigators down to the hypervisor and beyond.
We will detail how Fire Ant:
- Exploited vCenter and ESXi vulnerabilities to deploy persistent backdoors.
- Abused PowerCLI to execute commands in guest VMs from the hypervisor layer, bypassing endpoint defenses.
- Disabled ESXi logging to blind investigators.
- Deployed hidden rogue VMs invisible to inventory systems.
- Assigned public IPs to compromised VMs, transforming them into Internet-facing entry points.
- Used advanced stealth techniques, including rootkits, to maintain resilience even during remediation.
The presentation will not only expose Fire Ant’s tactics, but also showcase the investigation methodologies we used - correlating NetFlow, ARP tables, and PowerCLI sweeps to unmask attacker activity that would otherwise remain invisible.
Attendees will leave with:
- A technical blueprint of hypervisor-level espionage operations.
- Practical detection and investigation techniques for unmonitored infrastructure.
- Strategic lessons on how incident response must evolve when facing adaptive, nation- state adversaries.
This is a rare look into the reality of fighting an APT beneath the hypervisor, told from the front lines of incident response.
Speakers:
Asaf Perlman(アサフ・パールマン) Sygnia Incident Response Team Leader
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Location :
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Track 2(HALL A)
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Category :
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OpenTalks
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