Suspicious ThrottleStop Driver Abuse for Defense Evasion in Ransomware Attacks

ATT&CK techniques

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

What it detects

This rule detects execution of the ThrottleStop utility which ships a vulnerable driver abused to disable endpoint protection. Ransomware operators in Japanese incidents load ThrottleStop as part of their EDR-killer tooling before encryption. Bring-your-own-vulnerable-driver tools let an actor terminate security software from kernel space.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1685 — drag to rearrange

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Malicious Known Vulnerable Driver Load for BYOVD Attack

Malicious Qilin EDR Killer BYOVD Driver Load

Malicious Windows Defender Exclusion Added (via registry_set)

Suspicious Termination of Windows Security Health UI via taskkill

Suspicious ThrottleStop Driver Abuse for Defense Evasion in Ransomware Attacks

Pivot detection · T1685 · 9 related

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