The "Azure Recovery Services Protection Container Deleted" rule is designed to detect the deletion of protection containers essential for restoring virtual machine (VM) and workload backups within Azure Recovery Services. The rule addresses the rising threat of ransomware, particularly a pattern identified as Storm-0501. This threat actor conducts systematic deletions of backup containers to obliterate all recovery points, thus preventing potential recovery of compromised resources during ransomware attacks. The rule captures activity logs through Azure Monitor to identify such deletions, focusing on suspicious patterns, such as deletion requests from compromised accounts, especially following resource lock removals. Additionally, it performs checks for role assignments that indicate elevated permissions granted to potentially compromised identities within specific time frames. Effective monitoring through this detection is crucial as it highlights unauthorized backups' destruction which can signal a broader ransomware campaign.