T1578.004: Revert Cloud Instance
An adversary may revert changes made to a cloud instance after they have performed malicious activities in attempt to evade detection and remove evidence of their presence. In highly virtualized environments, such as cloud-based infrastructure, this may be accomplished by restoring virtual machine (VM) or data storage snapshots through the cloud management dashboard or cloud APIs.
Another variation of this technique is to utilize temporary storage attached to the compute instance. Most cloud providers provide various types of storage including persistent, local, and/or ephemeral, with the ephemeral types often reset upon stop/restart of the VM.
Detection
ID | DS0030 | Data source and component | Instance: Instance Metadata | Description | Periodically baseline instances to identify malicious modifications or additions. |
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ID | DS0030 | Data source and component | Instance: Instance Stop | Description | Establish centralized logging of instance activity, which can be used to monitor and review system events even after reverting to a snapshot, rolling back changes, or changing persistence/type of storage. Monitor specifically for events related to deactivation of instances that are occurring outside of planned operations. To reduce false positives, valid change management procedures could introduce a known identifier that is logged with the change (e.g., tag or header) if supported by the cloud provider, to help distinguish valid, expected actions from malicious ones. |
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ID | DS0030 | Data source and component | Instance: Instance Start | Description | Establish centralized logging of instance activity, which can be used to monitor and review system events even after reverting to a snapshot, rolling back changes, or changing persistence/type of storage. Monitor specifically for events related to activation of instances that are occurring outside of normal activity/planned operations. To reduce false positives, valid change management procedures could introduce a known identifier that is logged with the change (e.g., tag or header) if supported by the cloud provider, to help distinguish valid, expected actions from malicious ones. |
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ID | DS0030 | Data source and component | Instance: Instance Modification | Description | Establish centralized logging of instance activity, which can be used to monitor and review system events even after reverting to a snapshot, rolling back changes, or changing persistence/type of storage. Monitor specifically for events related to snapshots and rollbacks and VM configuration changes, that are occurring outside of normal activity. To reduce false positives, valid change management procedures could introduce a known identifier that is logged with the change (e.g., tag or header) if supported by the cloud provider, to help distinguish valid, expected actions from malicious ones. |
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