This article explores the technical specifics of the local.tgz.ve phenomenon, its relationship to ransomware families targeting ESXi hosts, and the steps administrators can take to recover their data. To understand the problem, we must first understand the file structure of a VMware ESXi host.
In the landscape of cybersecurity, few things are as alarming as finding an unfamiliar file extension appended to critical system data. For system administrators managing Linux environments—specifically VMware ESXi hypervisors—the appearance of a file named local.tgz.ve or files with the .ve extension often signals a specific and damaging type of security incident.
ESXi is a bare-metal hypervisor. Its operating system state is largely stored in memory, with configuration files and essential system packages stored in specific archives for persistence. A critical file in this architecture is local.tgz . This archive typically contains the local state configuration of the ESXi host.
When administrators or security researchers encounter a file named local.tgz.ve , it is almost exclusively an indicator of compromise. The .ve extension is not a standard VMware file format. Instead, it is a signature used by certain ransomware strains (most notably variants of the ransomware) to mark files that have been encrypted.