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T1070.003 Clear Command History

In addition to clearing system logs, an adversary may clear the command history of a compromised account to conceal the actions undertaken during an intrusion. Various command interpreters keep track of the commands users type in their terminal so that users can retrace what they’ve done.

On Linux and macOS, these command histories can be accessed in a few different ways. While logged in, this command history is tracked in a file pointed to by the environment variable HISTFILE. When a user logs off a system, this information is flushed to a file in the user’s home directory called ~/.bash_history. The benefit of this is that it allows users to go back to commands they’ve used before in different sessions. Adversaries may delete their commands from these logs by manually clearing the history (history -c) or deleting the bash history file rm ~/.bash_history.

Adversaries may also leverage a Network Device CLI on network devices to clear command history data (clear logging and/or clear history).4 On ESXi servers, command history may be manually removed from the /var/log/shell.log file.1

On Windows hosts, PowerShell has two different command history providers: the built-in history and the command history managed by the PSReadLine module. The built-in history only tracks the commands used in the current session. This command history is not available to other sessions and is deleted when the session ends.

The PSReadLine command history tracks the commands used in all PowerShell sessions and writes them to a file ($env:APPDATA\Microsoft\Windows\PowerShell\PSReadLine\ConsoleHost_history.txt by default). This history file is available to all sessions and contains all past history since the file is not deleted when the session ends.3

Adversaries may run the PowerShell command Clear-History to flush the entire command history from a current PowerShell session. This, however, will not delete/flush the ConsoleHost_history.txt file. Adversaries may also delete the ConsoleHost_history.txt file or edit its contents to hide PowerShell commands they have run.25

Item Value
ID T1070.003
Sub-techniques T1070.001, T1070.002, T1070.003, T1070.004, T1070.005, T1070.006, T1070.007, T1070.008, T1070.009, T1070.010
Tactics TA0005
Platforms ESXi, Linux, Network Devices, Windows, macOS
Version 1.6
Created 31 January 2020
Last Modified 24 October 2025

Procedure Examples

ID Name Description
G0096 APT41 APT41 attempted to remove evidence of some of its activity by deleting Bash histories.18
G1023 APT5 APT5 has cleared the command history on targeted ESXi servers.17
G0143 Aquatic Panda Aquatic Panda cleared command history in Linux environments to remove traces of activity after operations.10
S0601 Hildegard Hildegard has used history -c to clear script shell logs.9
S1203 J-magic J-magic can overwrite previously executed command line arguments.7
S0641 Kobalos Kobalos can remove all command history on compromised hosts.8
G0032 Lazarus Group Lazarus Group has routinely deleted log files on a compromised router, including automatic log deletion through the use of the logrotate utility.16
G0059 Magic Hound Magic Hound has removed mailbox export requests from compromised Exchange servers.15
G1051 Medusa Group Medusa Group has cleared command history by running the PowerShell command Remove-Item (Get-PSReadlineOption).HistorySavePath.11
G0045 menuPass menuPass has used Wevtutil to remove PowerShell execution logs.14
G0139 TeamTNT TeamTNT has cleared command history with history -c.1312

Mitigations

ID Mitigation Description
M1039 Environment Variable Permissions Making the environment variables associated with command history read only may ensure that the history is preserved.6
M1029 Remote Data Storage Forward logging of historical data to remote data store and centralized logging solution to preserve historical command line log data.
M1022 Restrict File and Directory Permissions Preventing users from deleting or writing to certain files can stop adversaries from maliciously altering their ~/.bash_history or ConsoleHost_history.txt files.

References

  1. Broadcom. (2025, February 20). Auditing ESXi Shell logins and commands. Retrieved March 26, 2025. ↩

  2. jak. (2020, June 27). Live Discover - PowerShell command audit. Retrieved August 21, 2020. ↩

  3. Microsoft. (2020, May 13). About History. Retrieved September 4, 2020. ↩

  4. US-CERT. (2018, April 20). Alert (TA18-106A) Russian State-Sponsored Cyber Actors Targeting Network Infrastructure Devices. Retrieved October 19, 2020. ↩

  5. Vikas, S. (2020, August 26). PowerShell Command History Forensics. Retrieved November 17, 2024. ↩

  6. Mathew Branwell. (2012, March 21). Securing .bash_history file. Retrieved July 8, 2017. ↩

  7. Black Lotus Labs. (2025, January 23). The J-Magic Show: Magic Packets and Where to find them. Retrieved February 17, 2025. ↩

  8. M.Leveille, M., Sanmillan, I. (2021, February 2). Kobalos – A complex Linux threat to high performance computing infrastructure. Retrieved August 24, 2021. ↩

  9. Chen, J. et al. (2021, February 3). Hildegard: New TeamTNT Cryptojacking Malware Targeting Kubernetes. Retrieved April 5, 2021. ↩

  10. CrowdStrike. (2023). 2022 Falcon OverWatch Threat Hunting Report. Retrieved May 20, 2024. ↩

  11. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. (2025, March 12). AA25-071A #StopRansomware: Medusa Ransomware. Retrieved October 15, 2025. ↩

  12. Darin Smith. (2022, April 21). TeamTNT targeting AWS, Alibaba. Retrieved August 4, 2022. ↩

  13. Fiser, D. Oliveira, A. (n.d.). Tracking the Activities of TeamTNT A Closer Look at a Cloud-Focused Malicious Actor Group. Retrieved September 22, 2021. ↩

  14. GREAT. (2021, March 30). APT10: sophisticated multi-layered loader Ecipekac discovered in A41APT campaign. Retrieved June 17, 2021. ↩

  15. DFIR Report. (2022, March 21). APT35 Automates Initial Access Using ProxyShell. Retrieved May 25, 2022. ↩

  16. Vyacheslav Kopeytsev and Seongsu Park. (2021, February 25). Lazarus targets defense industry with ThreatNeedle. Retrieved October 27, 2021. ↩

  17. Perez, D. et al. (2021, May 27). Re-Checking Your Pulse: Updates on Chinese APT Actors Compromising Pulse Secure VPN Devices. Retrieved February 5, 2024. ↩

  18. Fraser, N., et al. (2019, August 7). Double DragonAPT41, a dual espionage and cyber crime operation APT41. Retrieved September 23, 2019. ↩