Adversaries may stop or disable services on a system to render those services unavailable to legitimate users. Stopping critical services or processes can inhibit or stop response to an incident or aid in the adversary's overall objectives to cause damage to the environment.(Citation: Talos Olympic Destroyer 2018)(Citation: Novetta Blockbuster) Adversaries may accomplish this by disabling individual services of high importance to an organization, such as MSExchangeIS, which will make Exchange content inaccessible.(Citation: Novetta Blockbuster) In some cases, adversaries may stop or disable many or all services to render systems unusable.(Citation: Talos Olympic Destroyer 2018) Services or processes may not allow for modification of their data stores while running. Adversaries may stop services or processes in order to conduct [Data Destruction](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1485) or [Data Encrypted for Impact](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1486) on the data stores of services like Exchange and SQL Server, or on virtual machines hosted on ESXi infrastructure.(Citation: SecureWorks WannaCry Analysis)(Citation: Crowdstrike Hypervisor Jackpotting Pt 2 2021) Threat actors may also disable or stop service in cloud environments. For example, by leveraging the `DisableAPIServiceAccess` API in AWS, a threat actor may prevent the service from creating service-linked roles on new accounts in the AWS Organization.(Citation: Datadog Security Labs Cloud Persistence 2025)(Citation: AWS DisableAWSServiceAccess)

Linked Issues

Issuelinks
Linktype Issue
is related to Techniques
is blocked by Behavioral Detection for Service Stop across Platforms
is blocked by Network Segmentation
is blocked by User Account Management
is blocked by Out-of-Band Communications Channel
is blocked by Restrict Registry Permissions
is blocked by Restrict File and Directory Permissions
is blocked by Access Restriction For Change
is blocked by Security, Compliance & Resilience Controls Oversight
is blocked by Secure Baseline Configurations
is blocked by Least Functionality
is blocked by Continuous Monitoring
is blocked by Separation of Duties (SoD)
is blocked by Identification & Authentication for Organizational Users
is blocked by Account Management
is blocked by Access Enforcement
is blocked by Least Privilege
is blocked by Cross Domain Solution (CDS)
is blocked by Boundary Protection
is blocked by Data Flow Enforcement – Access Control Lists (ACLs)
is blocked by Out-of-Band Channels
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