414. That's How Threat Actors Abuse Direct Volume Access

Hello everyone!

Today, let’s take a look at Direct Volume Access (T1006) - a technique threat actors can use to bypass normal access controls and gain access to files they’re interested in, including those containing credentials.

For example, attackers can access Volume Shadow Copies to get around file locks and access protected data. In this case, the threat actors made multiple attempts to dump the Security Account Manager (SAM) and access the NTDS.dit database. They then used vssadmin to create shadow copies of the C:\ and F:\ drives:

vssadmin create shadow /for=C:

vssadmin create shadow /for=F:

While this activity can certainly be legitimate - for example, as part of backup or system administration tasks - the execution of these commands can also be a sign that an attacker is attempting to access files containing sensitive information.

This makes activity like this worth hunting for proactively:

event_type: "processcreatewin"

AND

proc_file_path: "vssadmin.exe"

AND

cmdline: ("create" AND "shadow")

See you next time!

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