AWS CloudWatch Alarm Deletion

Description

Detects the deletion of one or more Amazon CloudWatch alarms using the "DeleteAlarms" API. CloudWatch alarms are critical for monitoring metrics and triggering alerts when thresholds are exceeded. An adversary may delete alarms to impair visibility, silence alerts, and evade detection following malicious activity. This behavior may occur during post-exploitation or cleanup phases to remove traces of compromise or disable automated responses.

Detection logic

Its licence does not clear it for publishing here

Sunturai publishes a detection's own text where the licence it arrived under has been reviewed and permits it, and Elastic License 2.0 has not. The query as its source wrote it, its canonical form and the hash that pins this revision are in the workspace record.

Detection requirements

Platform: Containers ESXi IaaS Identity Provider Linux macOS Network Devices Office Suite Windows
The rule states no platform. This is derived from the ATT&CK technique it maps to.
Log source category: event_index

Known benign triggers

CloudWatch alarm deletions can occur legitimately during scheduled maintenance, infrastructure redeployments, or automation workflows that clean up temporary monitoring configurations. Verify that the user identity, role, and IP address are expected for the environment. If deletions are performed by CI/CD pipelines or authorized administrators during controlled operations, consider adding exceptions based on specific IAM roles, automation accounts, or IP address ranges.

References

Links the source published beside this detection. Reference is the link the source wrote, unmodified. Class is decided by this catalogue from the host and path, not stated by the source. Cited by counts published detections citing the same resource, including this one, and the sources beneath it count the repositories this catalogue ingests, which is not the same as independent research.
Reference	Class	Cited by
awscli.amazonaws.com/v2/documentation/api/latest/reference/cloudwatch/delete-alarms.html	Unclassified	Only this detection cites it
docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/APIReference/API_DeleteAlarms.html	Product documentation	Only this detection cites it

Detection rules

AWS CloudWatch Alarm Deletion

Description

Detection logic

Detection requirements

Known benign triggers

MITRE ATT&CK mappings

References

From the source

Licence

Authorship

Detection rules