Malicious Inhibit System Recovery via Shadow Copy Deletion and Boot Configuration

ATT&CK techniques

Impact

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

What it detects

This rule detects deletion of volume shadow copies and disabling of Windows recovery via bcdedit which active ransomware families execute before encryption. Observed in NCC Group research into active ransomware families including a BlackCat incident response engagement. Removing recovery options maximizes ransomware impact which makes this a high-confidence pre-encryption indicator.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1490 — drag to rearrange

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 Volume Shadow Copy Deletion via vssadmin

Malicious Inhibit System Recovery via Shadow Copy and Boot Config Tampering (via process_creation)

Malicious Recovery Disablement via Bcdedit RecoveryEnabled No

Suspicious Volume Shadow Copy Deletion via vssadmin or wmic

Malicious System Recovery Inhibition via bcdedit and wbadmin before Ransomware (via process_creation)

Suspicious ESXi execInstalledOnly Disabled via esxcli During Ransomware

Malicious Inhibit System Recovery via Shadow Copy Deletion and Boot Configuration

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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