T1485 Data Destruction

Data destruction removes or overwrites production data to make it unrecoverable. An isolated recovery copy sits outside the same destructive access path, preserving data that can be restored after production copies are destroyed.

Data destruction depends on the attacker being able to delete or overwrite stored data. Where recovery data is held on immutable storage, deletion-protected repositories, or tightly restricted backup systems, those controls can prevent destruction of the protected copy.

Adversaries destroy data to impair operations or deny access to information. Automated backups preserve earlier copies of the affected data, directly enabling restoration and reducing the operational effectiveness of the destruction.

In cloud environments, using role-based access control (RBAC) to limit user permissions to modify cloud bucket lifecycle policies to only users with a legitimate need can help prevent adversaries from destroying data and files.

Retention is protective because it limits the time window in which valuable data remains available for destruction, tampering, or cleanup by an attacker. Data retention policies protect against adversaries deleting logs by mandating strict storage lifecycles, off-site replication, and immutability.

Retention is protective because it limits the time window in which valuable data remains available for destruction, tampering, or cleanup by an attacker.

Secure disposal directly addresses preventing unauthorized recovery or persistence of sensitive data remnants.

Backup and DR-Actifio GO is a copy data management plaform that virtualizes application data to improve an organizations resiliency and cloud mobility. This capability allows an organization to take regular backups and provides several methods of restoring applications and/or VM data to a previous state. This provides significant ability to respond to a Data Destruction event since an organization could easily restore lost data back to the latest backup.

AWS CloudEndure Disaster Recovery enables the replication and recovery of servers into AWS Cloud. In the event that data on servers is destroyed, AWS CloudEndure can be used to provision an instance of the server from a previous point in time within minutes. As a result, this mapping is given a score of Significant.

AWS Security Hub performs a check from the AWS Foundations CIS Benchmark that, if implemented, would help towards detecting the scheduled destruction of Customer Master Keys (CMKs) which are critical for being able to decrypt data. AWS Security Hub provides this detection with the following check. Ensure a log metric filter and alarm exist for disabling or scheduled deletion of customer created CMKs This is scored as Minimal because CMKs only represent one type of data that could be destroyed by an adversary.

The following AWS Config managed rules can identify configuration problems that should be fixed in order to prevent malicious write access to data within Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) storage, which may include data destruction: "s3-bucket-blacklisted-actions-prohibited" checks whether bucket policies prohibit disallowed actions (including S3:DeleteObject) for principals from other AWS accounts, "s3-bucket-default-lock-enabled" checks whether a bucket that should be locked in write-once-read-many (WORM) mode is configured to prevent modification, and "s3-bucket-public-write-prohibited" checks whether a bucket is configured to allow public access and modification. All of these controls are run on configuration changes. The following AWS Config managed rules can identify configuration problems that should be fixed in order to ensure backups and redundancy are in place which can mitigate the effects of data destruction: "aurora-mysql-backtracking-enabled" for data in Aurora MySQL; "db-instance-backup-enabled" and "rds-in-backup-plan" for Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) data; "dynamodb-in-backup-plan" and "dynamodb-pitr-enabled" for Amazon DynamoDB table contents; "ebs-in-backup-plan" for Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes; "efs-in-backup-plan" for Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) file systems; "elasticache-redis-cluster-automatic-backup-check" for Amazon ElastiCache Redis cluster data; "redshift-backup-enabled" and "redshift-cluster-maintenancesettings-check" for Redshift; "s3-bucket-replication-enabled" and "s3-bucket-versioning-enabled" for S3 storage; and "cloudfront-origin-failover-enabled" for CloudFront. The following AWS Config managed rules provide specific detections for configuration problems that should be fixed in order to prevent malicious deletion of specific data: "elb-deletion-protection-enabled" for Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, and "rds-cluster-deletion-protection-enabled" and "rds-instance-deletion-protection-enabled" for RDS data. Coverage factor is partial for these rules, since they are specific to a subset of the available AWS services and will only protect certain types of data against destruction, resulting in an overall score of Partial.

AWS RDS provides deletion protection which prevents any user from deleting a database instance. If applied, the setting may mitigate attempts to delete a database instance. As a result, this mapping is given a score of Significant.

AWS RDS generates events for database instances and includes the following events that may indicate that an adversary has destroyed the database instance. RDS-EVENT-0003: The DB instance has been deleted RDS-EVENT-0041: A DB snapshot has been deleted This mapping is given a score of Partial because it can't differentiate between an authorized and unauthorized deletion.

AWS RDS supports the replication and recovery of database instances. In the event that a database instance is deleted, AWS RDS can be used to restore the database instance to a previous point in time. As a result, this mapping is given a score of Significant.

IAM Access Analyzer can protect against adversaries destroying data and resources in cloud environments. Its policy generation helps administrators remove unneeded permissions to delete storage objects, buckets, and other resources. It is scored as Partial because generated policies must be reviewed and applied by administrators.

The following GuardDuty finding type flags events where adversaries may destroy data and files on specific systems or in large numbers on a network to interrupt availability to systems, services, and network resources. Impact:S3/MaliciousIPCaller, Impact:IAMUser/AnomalousBehavior Stealth:S3/ServerAccessLoggingDisabled UnauthorizedAccess:S3/MaliciousIPCaller.Custom UnauthorizedAccess:S3/TorIPCaller PenTest:S3/PentooLinux PenTest:S3/ParrotLinux PenTest:S3/KaliLinux

AWS S3 may protect against data destruction through application of several best practices. Multi-factor authentication can be enabled for delete operations and for changing the versioning state of a bucket. Versioning can be enabled to revert objects to a previous state after malicious destruction or corruption. S3 Object Lock can help prevent objects from being deleted or overwritten for a fixed amount of time or indefinitely. In addition, S3 Cross Region Replication can be used to replicate S3 buckets to another AWS region for add protection.