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T1578.001 Create Snapshot

An adversary may create a snapshot or data backup within a cloud account to evade defenses. A snapshot is a point-in-time copy of an existing cloud compute component such as a virtual machine (VM), virtual hard drive, or volume. An adversary may leverage permissions to create a snapshot in order to bypass restrictions that prevent access to existing compute service infrastructure, unlike in Revert Cloud Instance where an adversary may revert to a snapshot to evade detection and remove evidence of their presence.

An adversary may Create Cloud Instance, mount one or more created snapshots to that instance, and then apply a policy that allows the adversary access to the created instance, such as a firewall policy that allows them inbound and outbound SSH access.1

Item Value
ID T1578.001
Sub-techniques T1578.001, T1578.002, T1578.003, T1578.004
Tactics TA0005
Platforms IaaS
Permissions required User
Version 1.1
Created 09 June 2020
Last Modified 08 March 2021

Mitigations

ID Mitigation Description
M1047 Audit Routinely check user permissions to ensure only the expected users have the capability to create snapshots and backups.
M1018 User Account Management Limit permissions for creating snapshots or backups in accordance with least privilege. Organizations should limit the number of users within the organization with an IAM role that has administrative privileges, strive to reduce all permanent privileged role assignments, and conduct periodic entitlement reviews on IAM users, roles and policies.1

Detection

ID Data Source Data Component
DS0020 Snapshot Snapshot Creation

References

  1. Amazon. (2020). Logging AWS Backup API Calls with AWS CloudTrail. Retrieved April 27, 2020. ↩

  2. Microsoft. (2019, June 4). Monitor at scale by using Azure Monitor. Retrieved May 1, 2020. ↩

  3. Google. (n.d.). Audit Logs. Retrieved June 1, 2020. ↩

  4. Google. (2020, April 23). Creating and Starting a VM instance. Retrieved May 1, 2020. ↩