Lifecycle-Triggered Deletion

T1485.001

Sub-technique of T1485 Data Destruction.View on attack.mitre.org

About this technique

Adversaries may modify the lifecycle policies of a cloud storage bucket to destroy all objects stored within.

Cloud storage buckets often allow users to set lifecycle policies to automate the migration, archival, or deletion of objects after a set period of time. If a threat actor has sufficient permissions to modify these policies, they may be able to delete all objects at once.

For example, in AWS environments, an adversary with the `PutLifecycleConfiguration` permission may use the `PutBucketLifecycle` API call to apply a lifecycle policy to an S3 bucket that deletes all objects in the bucket after one day. In addition to destroying data for purposes of extortion and Financial Theft, adversaries may also perform this action on buckets storing cloud logs for Indicator Removal.

Detection rules2

Rules on DetectionCode tagged with T1485.001.

Sigma0

No Sigma rules are mapped to this technique yet.

Splunk2

RuleTypeRiskData source
ASL AWS Defense Evasion PutBucketLifecycleHuntingNULLASL AWS CloudTrail
AWS Defense Evasion PutBucketLifecycleHuntingNULLAWS CloudTrail PutBucketLifecycle

Groups0

None recorded.

Software0

None recorded.

Campaigns0

None recorded.

Procedure examples0

No procedure examples are recorded for this technique.

References6

  1. AWS Storage Lifecycles Open source
    AWS. (n.d.). Managing the lifecycle of objects. Retrieved September 25, 2024.
  2. Azure Storage Lifecycles Open source
    Microsoft Azure. (2024, July 3). Configure a lifecycle management policy. Retrieved September 25, 2024.
  3. Datadog S3 Lifecycle CloudTrail Logs Open source
    Stratus Red Team. (n.d.). CloudTrail Logs Impairment Through S3 Lifecycle Rule. Retrieved September 25, 2024.
  4. GCP Storage Lifecycles Open source
    Google Cloud. (n.d.). Object Lifecycle Management. Retrieved September 25, 2024.
  5. Halcyon AWS Ransomware 2025 Open source
    Halcyon RISE Team. (2025, January 13). Abusing AWS Native Services: Ransomware Encrypting S3 Buckets with SSE-C. Retrieved March 18, 2025.
  6. Palo Alto Cloud Ransomware Open source
    Ofir Balassiano and Ofir Shaty. (2023, November 29). Ransomware in the Cloud: Breaking Down the Attack Vectors. Retrieved September 25, 2024.

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