hunting-for-shadow-copy-deletion

name	hunting-for-shadow-copy-deletion
description	Hunt for Volume Shadow Copy deletion activity that indicates ransomware preparation or anti-forensics by monitoring vssadmin, wmic, and PowerShell shadow copy commands. Use when hunting for volume shadow copy deletion activity that indicates ransomware.
domain	cybersecurity
tags	["threat-hunting","mitre-attack","shadow-copy","ransomware","anti-forensics","t1490","proactive-detection"]
subdomain	threat-hunting
version	1.0
author	oyi77
license	Apache-2.0
d3fend_techniques	["Platform Hardening","Restore Object","Restore Configuration","Restore Software","Software Update"]
nist_csf	["DE.CM-01","DE.AE-02","DE.AE-07","ID.RA-05"]

Hunting For Shadow Copy Deletion

Overview

Cybersecurity skill for hunting for shadow copy deletion. Follows industry best practices and security standards.

When to Use

Trigger phrases:

• "hunting for shadow copy deletion"

• "When proactively hunting for indicators of hunting for shadow copy deletion in t"

• "After threat intelligence indicates active campaigns using these techniques"

• "During incident response to scope compromise related to these techniques"

• When proactively hunting for indicators of hunting for shadow copy deletion in the environment

• After threat intelligence indicates active campaigns using these techniques

• During incident response to scope compromise related to these techniques

• When EDR or SIEM alerts trigger on related indicators

• During periodic security assessments and purple team exercises

When NOT to Use

• When you lack proper authorization for testing
• For production systems without change management
• When the task requires legal or compliance expertise beyond technical scope

Prerequisites

• EDR platform with process and network telemetry (CrowdStrike, MDE, SentinelOne)
• SIEM with relevant log data ingested (Splunk, Elastic, Sentinel)
• Sysmon deployed with comprehensive configuration
• Windows Security Event Log forwarding enabled
• Threat intelligence feeds for IOC correlation

Workflow

# Example: IOC detection
import re

IOC_PATTERNS = {
    "ip": r"\b(?:\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}\b",
    "domain": r"\b[a-z0-9-]+\.[a-z]{2,}\b",
    "hash_md5": r"\b[a-f0-9]{32}\b",
    "hash_sha256": r"\b[a-f0-9]{64}\b",
}

def extract_iocs(text: str) -> dict:
    return {k: re.findall(v, text)  k, v  IOC_PATTERNS.items()}