Platforms / Security resources

MITRE ATT&CK

Enterprise v20 / 15 tactics / 227 techniques / 479 sub-techniques

Defense Impairment / T1578.004

Revert Cloud Instance

Sub-technique / Enterprise ATT&CK

Official MITRE entry

An adversary may revert changes made to a cloud instance after they have performed malicious activities in attempt to evade detection and remove evidence of their presence. In highly virtualized environments, such as cloud-based infrastructure, this may be accomplished by restoring virtual machine (VM) or data storage snapshots through the cloud management dashboard or cloud APIs.

Another variation of this technique is to utilize temporary storage attached to the compute instance. Most cloud providers provide various types of storage including persistent, local, and/or ephemeral, with the ephemeral types often reset upon stop/restart of the VM.(Citation: Tech Republic - Restore AWS Snapshots)(Citation: Google - Restore Cloud Snapshot)

Source references

Source: MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise v20, retrieved 2026-10-31. MITRE ATT&CK is a registered trademark of The MITRE Corporation.