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

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Suspicious ThrottleStop Driver Abuse for Defense Evasion in Ransomware Attacks

Pivot detection · T1685 · 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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