Adversaries may impair a system's ability to hibernate, reboot, or shut down in order to extend access to infected machines. When a computer enters a dormant state, some or all software and hardware may cease to operate which can disrupt malicious activity.^[1]

Adversaries may abuse system utilities and configuration settings to maintain access by preventing machines from entering a state, such as standby, that can terminate malicious activity.^[2],[3]

For example, powercfg controls all configurable power system settings on a Windows system and can be abused to prevent an infected host from locking or shutting down.^[4] Adversaries may also extend system lock screen timeout settings.^[5] Other relevant settings, such as disk and hibernate timeout, can be similarly abused to keep the infected machine running even if no user is active.^[6]

Aware that some malware cannot survive system reboots, adversaries may entirely delete files used to invoke system shut down or reboot.^[7]

References

1. AVG. (n.d.). Should You Shut Down, Sleep or Hibernate Your PC or Mac Laptop?. Retrieved June 8, 2023.
2. Microsoft. (2021, December 15). Powercfg command-line options. Retrieved June 5, 2023.
3. Man7. (n.d.). systemd-sleep.conf(5) — Linux manual page. Retrieved June 7, 2023.
4. Douglas Bonderud. (2018, September 17). Two New Monero Malware Attacks Target Windows and Android Users. Retrieved June 5, 2023.
5. Bethany Hardin, Lavine Oluoch, Tatiana Vollbrecht. (2022, November 14). BATLOADER: The Evasive Downloader Malware. Retrieved June 5, 2023.
6. Avira. (2019, November 28). CoinLoader: A Sophisticated Malware Loader Campaign. Retrieved June 5, 2023.
7. Joie Salvio and Roy Tay. (2023, June 20). Condi DDoS Botnet Spreads via TP-Link's CVE-2023-1389. Retrieved September 5, 2023.

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