Currently viewing ATT&CK v8.2 which was live between October 27, 2020 and April 28, 2021. Learn more about the versioning system or see the live site.

Gather Victim Org Information: Identify Roles

Before compromising a victim, adversaries may gather information about identities and roles within the victim organization that can be used during targeting. Information about business roles may reveal a variety of targetable details, including identifiable information for key personnel as well as what data/resources they have access to.

Adversaries may gather this information in various ways, such as direct elicitation via Phishing for Information. Information about business roles may also be exposed to adversaries via online or other accessible data sets (ex: Social Media or Search Victim-Owned Websites).[1] Gathering this information may reveal opportunities for other forms of reconnaissance (ex: Phishing for Information or Search Open Websites/Domains), establishing operational resources (ex: Establish Accounts or Compromise Accounts), and/or initial access (ex: Phishing).

ID: T1591.004
Sub-technique of:  T1591
Tactic: Reconnaissance
Platforms: PRE
Version: 1.0
Created: 02 October 2020
Last Modified: 24 October 2020

Mitigations

Mitigation Description
Pre-compromise

This technique cannot be easily mitigated with preventive controls since it is based on behaviors performed outside of the scope of enterprise defenses and controls. Efforts should focus on minimizing the amount and sensitivity of data available to external parties.

Detection

Much of this activity may have a very high occurrence and associated false positive rate, as well as potentially taking place outside the visibility of the target organization, making detection difficult for defenders.

Detection efforts may be focused on related stages of the adversary lifecycle, such as during Initial Access.

References