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Local Storage Discovery (T1680) is a MITRE ATT&CK technique associated with Discovery . Adversaries may enumerate local drives, disks, and/or volumes and their attributes like total or free space and volume serial number.
Local Storage Discovery (T1680) is a MITRE ATT&CK technique associated with Discovery. Adversaries may enumerate local drives, disks, and/or volumes and their attributes like total or free space and volume serial number.
Attackers use Local Storage Discovery because it provides a reliable way to advance their objective within the Discovery tactic, often with a favorable balance of impact versus detectability on ESXi, IaaS, Linux, macOS, Windows environments. Defenders should assess this behavior in the context of the affected platform and adjacent activity rather than treating it as a standalone indicator.
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)
No universal command represents Local Storage Discovery. Capture the exact command line, arguments, parent process, account, host, and execution time from the investigated environment; do not operationalize unverified examples.
| Event ID | Log Channel | What It Indicates |
|---|---|---|
| Environment-specific | Relevant Windows channel(s) | Correlate authentication, process, object-access, and configuration events with the observed execution context. |
| Sysmon Event ID | Name | Why It's Relevant Here |
|---|---|---|
| Environment-specific | Validate configured telemetry | Use process, network, file, registry, DNS, or image-load telemetry only when relevant and enabled. |
No MITRE detection guidance published for this technique.
Relevant ATT&CK Data Sources: N/A
A universal Sigma rule would create unreliable results because this technique has no single guaranteed observable. Build detection logic from a documented behavior and supported data source, scope it to the affected platform, and validate it against benign administrative activity before deployment.
Start with the data sources named in the detection section. Scope searches by asset, identity, and time window; correlate the primary behavior with preceding access and subsequent actions. A portable query is intentionally not provided where the technique lacks a universal schema or observable.
No MITRE mitigations mapped to this technique.