AWS GuardDuty Detector Deletion

Last updated 2 months ago on 2025-11-12

Created 6 years ago on 2020-05-28

About

Detects the deletion of an Amazon GuardDuty detector. GuardDuty provides continuous monitoring for malicious or unauthorized activity across AWS accounts. Deleting the detector disables this visibility, stopping all threat detection and removing existing findings. Adversaries may delete GuardDuty detectors to impair security monitoring and evade detection during or after an intrusion. This rule identifies successful "DeleteDetector" API calls and can indicate a deliberate defense evasion attempt.

Tags

Domain: CloudData Source: AWSData Source: Amazon Web ServicesData Source: AWS GuardDutyTactic: Defense EvasionLanguage: kuery

Severity

high

Risk Score

MITRE ATT&CK™

Defense Evasion (TA0005)(external, opens in a new tab or window)

↳ Impair Defenses (T1562)(external, opens in a new tab or window)

False Positive Examples

The GuardDuty detector may be deleted by a system or network administrator. Verify whether the user identity, user agent, and/or hostname should be making changes in your environment. Detector deletions by unfamiliar users or hosts should be investigated. If known behavior is causing false positives, it can be exempted from the rule.

License

Elastic License v2(external, opens in a new tab or window)

Definition

Rule Type: Query (Kibana Query Language)
Integration Pack: Prebuilt Security Detection Rules
Index Patterns: filebeat-*logs-aws.cloudtrail-*
Related Integrations: aws(external, opens in a new tab or window)
Query

✄𐘗text code block:
✄𐘗event.dataset: aws.cloudtrail 
  and event.provider: guardduty.amazonaws.com 
  and event.action: DeleteDetector 
  and event.outcome: success

Install detection rules in Elastic Security

Detect AWS GuardDuty Detector Deletion in the Elastic Security detection engine by installing this rule into your Elastic Stack.

To setup this rule, check out the installation guide for Prebuilt Security Detection Rules(external, opens in a new tab or window).