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Researchers have identified a new malware family that was designed to backdoor and create persistence on VMware ESXi servers by leveraging legitimate functionality the hypervisor software supports. According to researchers from Mandiant who found and analyzed the backdoors, they were packaged and deployed on infected servers as vSphere Installation Bundles (VIBs). VIBs are software packages used to distribute components that extend VMware ESXi functionality. The malicious VIBs provided hackers with remote command execution and persistence capabilities on the servers and the ability to execute commands on the guest virtual machines running on the servers.