ATT&CK coverage › Technique
Data Destruction T1485
Adversaries may destroy data and files on specific systems or in large numbers on a network to interrupt availability to systems, services, and network resources. Data destruction is likely to render stored data irrecoverable by forensic techniques through overwriting files or data on local and remote drives. Common operating system file deletion commands such as <code>del</code> and <code>rm</code> often only remove pointers to files without wiping the contents of the files themselves, making the files recoverable by proper forensic methodology. This behavior is distinct from Disk Content Wipe and Disk Structure Wipe because individual files are destroyed rather than sections of a storage disk or the disk's logical structure.
Events covered
13 catalog events are tagged with this technique by at least one rule.
Authoring guide
Patterns shared across the 18 rules above: which fields they filter on, what specific values they look for, and what they exclude. Field names are normalized across vendors so Sigma's Image, Elastic's process.name, and Splunk's process_name collapse into one row. Each rule contributes at most once per row.
Fields filtered most (21 distinct)
The fields most rules look at when detecting this technique. The How column shows the operators authors use (eq, wildcard, regex_match, match) and how often each appears. Sample values are concrete examples to start from, not an exhaustive list.
Top indicator values (92 distinct)
Specific (field, operator, value) combinations the rules check for, ranked by how many rules under this technique use each one. The Corpus reach column counts how many rules across the entire catalog (any technique) check the same combination. High numbers point to widely-used indicators that are likely noisy on their own; combine them with another condition for useful signal. Blank means the combination is specific to rules under this technique.
Common exclusions (30 distinct)
Field/operator/value combinations that rules under this technique routinely exclude (top-level not() clauses). These are the false-positive paths the community has learned to filter out. A new rule that ignores the high-count entries here will likely fire on the same noisy paths.
Rules under this technique
Every rule in the catalog tagged with this technique, grouped by vendor. Click a rule title for its full predicates, exclusions, and indicators.
Sigma 5 rules
- Deleted Data Overwritten Via Cipher.EXE
- Fsutil Suspicious Invocation
- Potential File Overwrite Via Sysinternals SDelete
- Potential Secure Deletion with SDelete
- Renamed Sysinternals Sdelete Execution
Splunk 8 rules
- Common Ransomware Extensions
- Common Ransomware Notes
- Detect DNS Query to Decommissioned S3 Bucket
- Excessive File Deletion In WinDefender Folder
- Windows Data Destruction Recursive Exec Files Deletion
- Windows Disable Memory Crash Dump
- Windows File Without Extension In Critical Folder
- Windows High File Deletion Frequency