Malicious Azure Storage and Compute Destruction via Key Listing and Snapshot Deletion

ATT&CK techniques

Impact

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact
- T1486Data Encrypted for Impact
- T1490Inhibit System Recovery

What it detects

This rule detects Azure operations that list storage account keys and delete storage or compute snapshots. Microsoft observed Storm-0501 combining these to exfiltrate then destroy cloud data and backups for extortion. Bulk key retrieval followed by resource and snapshot deletion is destructive impact activity, so these operations should be treated as a possible cloud ransomware event.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1490 — drag to rearrange

Malicious Volume Shadow Copy Deletion via Vssadmin

Malicious Shadow Copy Deletion and Recovery Inhibition via process_creation

RedCurl QWCrypt Ransomware Execution with Hyper-V Targeting Flags

Malicious Azure Deletion of Resource Locks and Immutability Policies

Malicious BitLocker Encryption With Shadow Copy Removal via manage-bde (via process_creation)

Windows process activity matching WannaCry executables and ransom note text

Malicious Shadow Copy Deletion via WMIC via Process Creation (via process_creation)

Suspicious Anti-Recovery Zeroing via fsutil setZeroData (via process_creation)

Malicious Shadow Copy Removal via WMI PowerShell

Malicious Azure Storage and Compute Destruction via Key Listing and Snapshot Deletion

Pivot detection · T1490 · 9 related

Detection content is published as a reviewed draft. Tune thresholds and exclusions against your own telemetry before enabling this rule for alerting.

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