Adversaries may maliciously modify components of a victim environment in order to hinder or disable defensive mechanisms. This not only involves impairing preventative defenses, such as firewalls and anti-virus, but also detection capabilities that defenders can use to audit activity and identify malicious behavior. This may also span both native defenses as well as supplemental capabilities installed by users and administrators.
Adversaries may also impair routine operations that contribute to defensive hygiene, such as blocking users from logging out of a computer or stopping it from being shut down. These restrictions can further enable malicious operations as well as the continued propagation of incidents.(Citation: Emotet shutdown)
Adversaries could also target event aggregation and analysis mechanisms, or otherwise disrupt these procedures by altering other system components.
View in MITRE ATT&CK®Capability ID | Capability Description | Mapping Type | ATT&CK ID | ATT&CK Name | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
SC-08 | Transmission Confidentiality and Integrity | Protects | T1562 | Impair Defenses | |
SC-08 | Transmission Confidentiality and Integrity | Protects | T1562 | Impair Defenses | |
AC-02 | Account Management | Protects | T1562 | Impair Defenses | |
AC-03 | Access Enforcement | Protects | T1562 | Impair Defenses | |
AC-05 | Separation of Duties | Protects | T1562 | Impair Defenses | |
AC-06 | Least Privilege | Protects | T1562 | Impair Defenses | |
CA-07 | Continuous Monitoring | Protects | T1562 | Impair Defenses | |
CA-08 | Penetration Testing | Protects | T1562 | Impair Defenses | |
CM-02 | Baseline Configuration | Protects | T1562 | Impair Defenses | |
CM-05 | Access Restrictions for Change | Protects | T1562 | Impair Defenses | |
CM-06 | Configuration Settings | Protects | T1562 | Impair Defenses | |
CM-07 | Least Functionality | Protects | T1562 | Impair Defenses | |
IA-02 | Identification and Authentication (organizational Users) | Protects | T1562 | Impair Defenses | |
IA-04 | Identifier Management | Protects | T1562 | Impair Defenses | |
RA-05 | Vulnerability Monitoring and Scanning | Protects | T1562 | Impair Defenses | |
SI-03 | Malicious Code Protection | Protects | T1562 | Impair Defenses | |
SI-04 | System Monitoring | Protects | T1562 | Impair Defenses | |
SI-07 | Software, Firmware, and Information Integrity | Protects | T1562 | Impair Defenses | |
PUR-AS-E5 | Audit Solutions | Technique Scores | T1562 | Impair Defenses |
Comments
Microsoft Purview auditing solutions provide an integrated solution to help organizations effectively respond to security events, forensic investigations, internal investigations, and compliance obligations. Thousands of user and admin operations performed in dozens of Microsoft 365 services and solutions are captured, recorded, and retained in your organization's unified audit log. Audit records for these events are searchable by security ops, IT admins, insider risk teams, and compliance and legal investigators in your organization. This capability provides visibility into the activities performed across your Microsoft 365 organization.
Microsoft's Audit Solutions protects from Impair Defense attacks due to Audit Solutions providing the visibility to allow admins to routinely check account role permissions to ensure only expected users and roles have permission to modify defensive tools and settings.
License Requirements:
Microsoft 365 E3 and E5
References
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ME-RBAC-E3 | Role Based Access Control | Technique Scores | T1562 | Impair Defenses |
Comments
The RBAC control can be used to partially protect against the ability to Disable or Modify Cloud Logs, but has minimal coverage against this technique's other sub-techniques and example procedures. Due to its Minimal coverage score, it receives an overall score of minimal.
License Requirements:
ME-ID Built-in Roles (Free)
References
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DEF-SecScore-E3 | Secure Score | Technique Scores | T1562 | Impair Defenses |
Comments
Microsoft Secure Score is a measurement of an organization's security posture, with a higher number indicating more recommended actions taken. It can be found at Microsoft Secure Score in the Microsoft Defender portal.
Following the Secure Score recommendations can protect your organization from threats. From a centralized dashboard in the Microsoft Defender portal, organizations can monitor and work on the security of their Microsoft 365 identities, apps, and devices. Your score is updated in real time to reflect the information presented in the visualizations and recommended action pages. Secure Score also syncs daily to receive system data about your achieved points for each action.
To help you find the information you need more quickly, Microsoft recommended actions are organized into groups:
Identity (Microsoft Entra accounts & roles)
Device (Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, known as Microsoft Secure Score for Devices)
Apps (email and cloud apps, including Office 365 and Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps)
Data (through Microsoft Information Protection)
References
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DEF-IR-E5 | Incident Response | Technique Scores | T1562 | Impair Defenses |
Comments
An incident in Microsoft Defender XDR is a collection of correlated alerts and associated data that make up the story of an attack. Microsoft 365 services and apps create alerts when they detect a suspicious or malicious event or activity. Individual alerts provide valuable clues about a completed or ongoing attack. Attacks typically employ various techniques against different types of entities, such as devices, users, and mailboxes. The result of this is multiple alerts for multiple entities in your tenant. Piecing the individual alerts together to gain insight into an attack can be challenging and time-consuming, Microsoft Defender XDR automatically aggregates the alerts and their associated information into an incident. A typical Incident Response workflow in Microsoft Defender XDR begins with a triage action, next is the investigate action, and finally is the response action.
Microsoft 365 Defender Incident Response responds to Impair Defense attacks due to Incident Response monitoring for changes to account settings, newly executed processes, and abnormal execution of API functions.
License Requirements:
Microsoft Defender XDR
References
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DO365-AG-E5 | App Governance | Technique Scores | T1562 | Impair Defenses |
Comments
App governance in Defender for Cloud Apps is a set of security and policy management capabilities designed for OAuth-enabled apps registered on Microsoft Entra ID, Google, and Salesforce. App governance delivers visibility, remediation, and governance into how these apps and their users access, use, and share sensitive data in Microsoft 365 and other cloud platforms through actionable insights and automated policy alerts and actions. App governance also enables you to see which user-installed OAuth applications have access to data on Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Salesforce. It tells you what permissions the apps have and which users have granted access to their accounts. App governance insights enable you to make informed decisions around blocking or restricting apps that present significant risk to your organization
App Governance Protects against Impair Defense attacks due to the governance feature where admins can create proactive or reactive policies to protect your users from using noncompliant or malicious apps and limiting the access of risky apps to your data to ensure that only approved security applications are used and running.
License Requirements:
Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps
References
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DO365-ATH-E5 | Advanced Threat Hunting | Technique Scores | T1562 | Impair Defenses |
Comments
Advanced hunting is a query-based threat hunting tool that lets you explore up to 30 days of raw data. Advanced hunting in Microsoft Defender XDR allows you to proactively hunt for threats across: Devices managed by Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Emails processed by Microsoft 365, Cloud app activities, authentication events, and domain controller activities. With this level of visibility, you can quickly hunt for threats that traverse sections of your network, including sophisticated intrusions that arrive on email or the web, elevate local privileges, acquire privileged domain credentials, and move laterally to across your devices. Advanced hunting supports two modes, guided and advanced. Users use advanced mode if they are comfortable using Kusto Query Language (KQL) to create queries from scratch.
Advanced Threat Hunting Detects Impair Defense attacks due to the DeviceNetworkEvents table in the advanced hunting schema which contains information about network connections and related events which monitors for the abnormal execution of API functions.
License Requirements:
Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 plan 2
References
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Technique ID | Technique Name | Number of Mappings |
---|---|---|
T1562.009 | Safe Mode Boot | 13 |
T1562.002 | Disable Windows Event Logging | 13 |
T1562.004 | Disable or Modify System Firewall | 13 |
T1562.012 | Disable or Modify Linux Audit System | 8 |
T1562.006 | Indicator Blocking | 17 |
T1562.007 | Disable or Modify Cloud Firewall | 6 |
T1562.010 | Downgrade Attack | 7 |
T1562.003 | Impair Command History Logging | 4 |
T1562.001 | Disable or Modify Tools | 13 |
T1562.011 | Spoof Security Alerting | 5 |
T1562.008 | Disable or Modify Cloud Logs | 13 |