Disk Content Wipe

What the technique is

Adversaries may erase the contents of storage devices on specific systems or in large numbers in a network to interrupt availability to system and network resources. Adversaries may partially or completely overwrite the contents of a storage device rendering the data irrecoverable through the storage interface. Instead of wiping specific disk structures or files, adversaries with destructive intent may wipe arbitrary portions of disk content. To wipe disk content, adversaries may acquire direct access to the hard drive in order to overwrite arbitrarily sized portions of disk with random data. Adversaries have also been observed leveraging third-party drivers like RawDisk to directly access disk content. This behavior is distinct from Data Destruction because sections of the disk are erased instead of individual files. To maximize impact on the target organization in operations where network-wide availability interruption is the goal, malware used for wiping disk content may have worm-like features to propagate across a network by leveraging additional techniques like Valid Accounts, OS Credential Dumping, and SMB/Windows Admin Shares.

What MITRE says you would watch

• AN0882

  Processes attempting raw disk access via \\.\PhysicalDrive paths, abnormal file I/O to MBR/boot sectors, or loading of third-party drivers (e.g., RawDisk) that enable disk overwrite. Correlate process creation, privilege usage, and disk modification events within a short time window.

• AN0883

  Execution of destructive utilities (dd, shred, wipe) targeting block devices, or processes invoking syscalls to directly overwrite /dev/sd* or /dev/nvme* partitions. Correlate abnormal file write attempts with shell process execution and block device access.

• AN0884

  Abnormal invocation of diskutil or asr with destructive flags (eraseDisk, zeroDisk), or low-level IOKit calls that overwrite raw disk content. Detect correlation between elevated process execution and disk erase operations.