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T1653 Power Settings

Adversaries may impair a system’s ability to hibernate, reboot, or shut down in order to extend access to infected machines. When a computer enters a dormant state, some or all software and hardware may cease to operate which can disrupt malicious activity.1

Adversaries may abuse system utilities and configuration settings to maintain access by preventing machines from entering a state, such as standby, that can terminate malicious activity.76

For example, powercfg controls all configurable power system settings on a Windows system and can be abused to prevent an infected host from locking or shutting down.4 Adversaries may also extend system lock screen timeout settings.3 Other relevant settings, such as disk and hibernate timeout, can be similarly abused to keep the infected machine running even if no user is active.2

Aware that some malware cannot survive system reboots, adversaries may entirely delete files used to invoke system shut down or reboot.5

Item Value
ID T1653
Sub-techniques
Tactics TA0003
Platforms Linux, Network Devices, Windows, macOS
Version 1.1
Created 05 June 2023
Last Modified 24 October 2025

Procedure Examples

ID Name Description
C0046 ArcaneDoor ArcaneDoor involved exploitation of CVE-2024-20353 to force a victim Cisco ASA to reboot, triggering the automated unzipping and execution of the Line Runner implant.8
S1186 Line Dancer Line Dancer can modify the crash dump process on infected machines to skip crash dump generation and proceed directly to device reboot for both persistence and forensic evasion purposes.8
S1188 Line Runner Line Runner used CVE-2024-20353 to trigger victim devices to reboot, in the process unzipping and installing the Line Dancer payload.8

Mitigations

ID Mitigation Description
M1047 Audit Periodically inspect systems for abnormal and unexpected power settings that may indicate malicious activty.

References

  1. AVG. (n.d.). Should You Shut Down, Sleep or Hibernate Your PC or Mac Laptop?. Retrieved June 8, 2023. ↩

  2. Avira. (2019, November 28). CoinLoader: A Sophisticated Malware Loader Campaign. Retrieved June 5, 2023. ↩

  3. Bethany Hardin, Lavine Oluoch, Tatiana Vollbrecht. (2022, November 14). BATLOADER: The Evasive Downloader Malware. Retrieved June 5, 2023. ↩

  4. Douglas Bonderud. (2018, September 17). Two New Monero Malware Attacks Target Windows and Android Users. Retrieved June 5, 2023. ↩

  5. Joie Salvio and Roy Tay. (2023, June 20). Condi DDoS Botnet Spreads via TP-Link’s CVE-2023-1389. Retrieved September 5, 2023. ↩

  6. Man7. (n.d.). systemd-sleep.conf(5) — Linux manual page. Retrieved June 7, 2023. ↩

  7. Microsoft. (2021, December 15). Powercfg command-line options. Retrieved June 5, 2023. ↩

  8. Cisco Talos. (2024, April 24). ArcaneDoor - New espionage-focused campaign found targeting perimeter network devices. Retrieved January 6, 2025. ↩↩↩