An adversary may revert changes made to a cloud instance after they have performed malicious activities in attempt to evade detection and remove evidence of their presence. In highly virtualized environments, such as cloud-based infrastructure, this may be accomplished by restoring virtual machine (VM) or data storage snapshots through the cloud management dashboard or cloud APIs.
Another variation of this technique is to utilize temporary storage attached to the compute instance. Most cloud providers provide various types of storage including persistent, local, and/or ephemeral, with the ephemeral types often reset upon stop/restart of the VM.(Citation: Tech Republic - Restore AWS Snapshots)(Citation: Google - Restore Cloud Snapshot)
View in MITRE ATT&CK®| Capability ID | Capability Description | Mapping Type | ATT&CK ID | ATT&CK Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PR.PS-01.09 | Virtualized end point protection | Mitigates | T1578.004 | Revert Cloud Instance |
Comments
The diagnostic statement highlights several mitigating controls that organizations can implement to protect endpoint systems using virtualization technologies. An adversary may attempt to modify a cloud account's compute service infrastructure to evade defenses. A modification to the compute service infrastructure can include the creation, deletion, or modification of one or more components such as compute instances, virtual machines, and snapshots. To aid in mitigating this technique, consider limiting user permissions to ensure only the expected users have the capability to modify cloud compute infrastructure components.
References
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| Capability ID | Capability Description | Mapping Type | ATT&CK ID | ATT&CK Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| action.hacking.variety.Abuse of functionality | Abuse of functionality. | related-to | T1578.004 | Revert Cloud Instance |
| Capability ID | Capability Description | Mapping Type | ATT&CK ID | ATT&CK Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| azure_role_based_access_control | Azure Role-Based Access Control | technique_scores | T1578.004 | Revert Cloud Instance |
Comments
This control can be used to implement the least-privilege principle for account management and thereby limit the number of accounts that can perform these privileged operations.
References
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| Capability ID | Capability Description | Mapping Type | ATT&CK ID | ATT&CK Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DEF-CAPP-E5 | Defender for Cloud Apps | Technique Scores | T1578.004 | Revert Cloud Instance |
Comments
This control can identify anomalous admin activity.
References
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