CHAIN-172 — Recovery Services Vault without immutability + Backup Contributor compromise

Summary

Severity: Critical · Likelihood: High · Logic: ALL

Why this chain matters

A Recovery Services Vault has no immutability policy AND soft-delete is shorter than the backup retention policy. A ransomware operator who escalates to Backup Contributor simply deletes recovery points before encrypting primary data — no restore path remains.

Component rules

This chain fires when its trigger conditions are met by the following rules. Click any rule to see its detection logic and compliance mappings.

Rule ID	Role
zt_bak_001	Trigger
zt_bak_002	Trigger

Attack walkthrough

Step 1 — Delete recovery points; soft-delete expires quickly.

Actor: Ransomware operator
MITRE ATT&CK: T1485
Enabled by: zt_bak_001

Attacker gain: Unrecoverable loss of backups.

Step 2 — Encrypt primary data; victim has no backup.

Actor: Attacker
MITRE ATT&CK: T1486
Enabled by: zt_bak_002

Attacker gain: Complete ransomware leverage.

Blast radius

Initial access	Backup Contributor.
Max privilege	Destruction of backup state.
Data at risk	All backed-up workloads
Services at risk	Every protected VM / database

How the logic works

The chain fires only when every rule above has at least one finding in the current scan. Missing any one rule breaks the chain — so remediating any single step disrupts the attack path.