Suspicious Volume Shadow Copy Deletion via vssadmin or wmic

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 using vssadmin or wmic, an inhibit recovery step performed by The Gentlemen ransomware before encryption. Removing shadow copies prevents victims from restoring files and is a strong pre-encryption indicator of a destructive attack.

Reporting behind it

Related detections9 linkedT1490 — drag to rearrange

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

Suspicious ESXi execInstalledOnly Disabled via esxcli During Ransomware

Malicious Akira Shadow Copy Deletion via PowerShell WMI (via process_creation)

Malicious Shadow Copy Deletion via WMI PowerShell

Malicious Shadow Copy Deletion via WMI PowerShell (via ps_script)

Malicious Volume Shadow Copy Deletion via Vssadmin

Malicious Volume Shadow Copy Deletion for Recovery Inhibition

Malicious Boot Configuration Tampering via bcdedit [Intel471] #2

Malicious Volume Shadow Copy Deletion Before Ransomware Encryption

Suspicious Volume Shadow Copy Deletion via vssadmin or wmic

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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