Adversaries may stop or disable services on a system to render those services unavailable to legitimate users. Stopping critical services or processes can inhibit or stop response to an incident or aid in the adversary's overall objectives to cause damage to the environment.(Citation: Talos Olympic Destroyer 2018)(Citation: Novetta Blockbuster)
Adversaries may accomplish this by disabling individual services of high importance to an organization, such as <code>MSExchangeIS</code>, which will make Exchange content inaccessible.(Citation: Novetta Blockbuster) In some cases, adversaries may stop or disable many or all services to render systems unusable.(Citation: Talos Olympic Destroyer 2018) Services or processes may not allow for modification of their data stores while running. Adversaries may stop services or processes in order to conduct Data Destruction or Data Encrypted for Impact on the data stores of services like Exchange and SQL Server, or on virtual machines hosted on ESXi infrastructure.(Citation: SecureWorks WannaCry Analysis)(Citation: Crowdstrike Hypervisor Jackpotting Pt 2 2021)
Threat actors may also disable or stop service in cloud environments. For example, by leveraging the DisableAPIServiceAccess API in AWS, a threat actor may prevent the service from creating service-linked roles on new accounts in the AWS Organization.(Citation: Datadog Security Labs Cloud Persistence 2025)(Citation: AWS DisableAWSServiceAccess)
| Capability ID | Capability Description | Mapping Type | ATT&CK ID | ATT&CK Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CIS-6.8 | Define and Maintain Role-Based Access Control | mitigates | T1489 | Service Stop |
Comments
Using role-based access control (RBAC) to limit user accounts and groups so that only authorized administrators can interact with service changes and service configurations can help prevent adversaries from stopping or disabling services.
References
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| CIS-16.8 | Separate Production and Non-Production Systems | mitigates | T1489 | Service Stop |
Comments
Separating production systems and supporting security or response infrastructure from non-production networks can reduce the ability of an adversary who compromises non-production systems to reach and stop critical production or defensive services.
References
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| Capability ID | Capability Description | Mapping Type | ATT&CK ID | ATT&CK Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| action.hacking.variety.Disable controls | Disable or interfere with security controls | related-to | T1489 | Service Stop | |
| action.malware.variety.DoS | DoS attack | related-to | T1489 | Service Stop | |
| attribute.availability.variety.Interruption | Interruption | related-to | T1489 | Service Stop |
| Capability ID | Capability Description | Mapping Type | ATT&CK ID | ATT&CK Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| amazon_inspector | Amazon Inspector | technique_scores | T1489 | Service Stop |
Comments
The Amazon Inspector Best Practices assessment package can assess security control "Configure permissions for system directories" that prevents privilege escalation by local users and ensures only the root account can modify/execute system configuration information and binaries. Amazon Inspector does not directly protect against system modifications rather it just checks to see if security controls are in place which can inform decisions around hardening the system. Due to this and the fact the security control is only supported for Linux platforms, the score is Minimal.
References
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| aws_rds | AWS RDS | technique_scores | T1489 | Service Stop |
Comments
AWS RDS generates events for database instances and includes the following event that may indicate that an adversary has attempted to stop a database instance.
RDS-EVENT-0087: The DB instance has been stopped
This mapping is given a score of Partial because it can't differentiate between an authorized and unauthorized stopping of the database instance.
References
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