- Tactics
- Discovery
- Platforms
- ESXi, IaaS, Linux, macOS, Windows
- Reference
- attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1680
Description
Adversaries may enumerate local drives, disks, and/or volumes and their attributes like total or free space and volume serial number. This can be done to prepare for ransomware-related encryption, to perform Lateral Movement, or as a precursor to Direct Volume Access.
On ESXi systems, adversaries may use Hypervisor CLI commands such as esxcli to list storage connected to the host as well as .vmdk files.(Citation: TrendMicro)(Citation: TrendMicro ESXI Ransomware)
On Windows systems, adversaries can use wmic logicaldisk get to find information about local network drives. They can also use Get-PSDrive in PowerShell to retrieve drives and may additionally use Windows API functions such as GetDriveType.(Citation: Trend Micro MUSTANG PANDA PUBLOAD HIUPAN SEPTEMBER 2024)(Citation: Volexity)
Linux has commands such as parted, lsblk, fdisk, lshw, and df that can list information about disk partitions such as size, type, file system types, and free space. The command diskutil on MacOS can be used to list disks while system_profiler SPStorageDataType can additionally show information such as a volume’s mount path, file system, and the type of drive in the system.
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud providers also have commands for storage discovery such as describe volume in AWS, gcloud compute disks list in GCP, and az disk list in Azure.(Citation: AWS docs describe volumes)(Citation: GCP gcloud compute disks list)(Citation: azure az disk)
How GTK Cyber trains on this
GTK Cyber's hands-on training programs cover detection engineering across the MITRE ATT&CK framework, including the Discovery tactic this technique falls under. Our practitioner-led courses focus on building real detections, not just memorizing technique IDs.
Related techniques
- T1007 — System Service Discovery
- T1010 — Application Window Discovery
- T1012 — Query Registry
- T1016 — System Network Configuration Discovery
- T1018 — Remote System Discovery
- T1033 — System Owner/User Discovery
- T1040 — Network Sniffing
- T1046 — Network Service Discovery
- T1049 — System Network Connections Discovery
- T1057 — Process Discovery
- T1069 — Permission Groups Discovery
- T1082 — System Information Discovery