Malicious Credential Hive Copy from Volume Shadow Copy

ATT&CK techniques

Cred Access

Recon
Resource Dev
Initial Access
Execution
Persistence
Priv Esc
Defense Evasion
Cred Access
- T1003.002Security Account Manager
- T1003.003NTDS
Discovery
Lateral Movement
Collection
C2
Exfiltration
Impact

What it detects

This rule detects a copy command referencing a HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy path together with a credential store name such as SAM, SYSTEM, or ntds.dit, a technique Huntress observed for extracting locked hives from a shadow copy. Attackers duplicate credential databases from the snapshot to bypass file locks before offline cracking. Copying hive files out of a shadow copy is a strong credential-access indicator.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1003.002 — drag to rearrange

Windows Print.EXE Sensitive File Dump for Credential Access

Windows File Events: NTDS.DIT Created by Suspicious or Rare Process

Zeek SMB: Network Share File Transfers of Credential-Related Filenames

Zeek SMB Files: Impacket SecretDump Access to ADMIN$ and System32 .tmp Droppers

Windows Credential Dump Tool Artifacts Written to Disk via File Events

Windows Volume Shadow Copy Symlink Creation Using mklink

Windows Network Share File Transfers Targeting Credential and Memory Dump Paths

Windows Shadow Copy Creation via PowerShell/pwsh/wmic/vssadmin Commands

Windows: Detect esentutl.exe Copying Sensitive Credential Files via VSS

Malicious Credential Hive Copy from Volume Shadow Copy

Pivot detection · T1003.002 · 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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