Suspicious S3 Lifecycle Policy Set for Rapid Object Deletion

PremiumReviewedSigma · Medium · v1
Product
aws
Service
cloudtrail
Author
HuntRule
Published
2026-09-16
Updated
2026-09-16

ATT&CK techniques

Impact
  1. Recon

  2. Resource Dev

  3. Initial Access

  4. Execution

  5. Persistence

  6. Priv Esc

  7. Defense Evasion

  8. Cred Access

  9. Discovery

  10. Lateral Movement

  11. Collection

  12. C2

  13. Exfiltration

What it detects

This rule detects an S3 PutBucketLifecycle call that configures a short object expiration, a destructive and coercive step in the AWS S3 SSE-C ransom scenario emulated by Elastic. Attackers set an aggressive deletion timer to pressure victims and permanently remove data if the ransom is unpaid. Lifecycle changes outside of approved data management workflows should be reviewed.

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Suspicious Free Space Wipe via cipher.exe
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Suspicious Secure Deletion of Free Space via Cipher (via process_creation)
Suspicious S3 Lifecycle Policy Set for Rapid Object Deletion
Pivot detection · T1485 · 9 related

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