Suspicious Free Space Wiping via Cipher

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 the cipher utility invoked with the wipe switch to overwrite deallocated disk space, destroying recoverable data. The ReadText34 ransomware operators ran cipher to hinder forensic recovery after encryption. Free-space wiping is an anti-recovery and anti-forensics action associated with the impact phase of ransomware.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1490 — drag to rearrange

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Malicious Shadow Copy and Backup Deletion via vssadmin wmic and wbadmin (via process_creation)

Malicious Volume Shadow Copy Deletion via Vssadmin

Malicious Inhibit System Recovery via Native Backup and Shadow Copy Deletion (via process_creation)

Malicious Inhibit System Recovery via bcdedit Boot Policy Change by Chaos Ransomware (via process_creation)

Malicious Shadow Copy Deletion and Recovery Inhibition via process_creation

Suspicious Free Space Wiping via Cipher

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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