Gather Victim Identity Information: Credentials

Other sub-techniques of Gather Victim Identity Information (3)

ID	Name
T1589.001	Credentials
T1589.002	Email Addresses
T1589.003	Employee Names

Adversaries may gather credentials that can be used during targeting. Account credentials gathered by adversaries may be those directly associated with the target victim organization or attempt to take advantage of the tendency for users to use the same passwords across personal and business accounts.

Adversaries may gather credentials from potential victims in various ways, such as direct elicitation via Phishing for Information. Adversaries may also compromise sites then include malicious content designed to collect website authentication cookies from visitors.^[1] Credential information may also be exposed to adversaries via leaks to online or other accessible data sets (ex: Search Engines, breach dumps, code repositories, etc.).^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5]^[6]^[7]^[8] Adversaries may also purchase credentials from dark web or other black-markets. Gathering this information may reveal opportunities for other forms of reconnaissance (ex: Search Open Websites/Domains or Phishing for Information), establishing operational resources (ex: Compromise Accounts), and/or initial access (ex: External Remote Services or Valid Accounts).

Law Assessment

Article	Assessment
None assessed	There could be an assessment of a subtechnique.

Forensics

Forensic Domain	Assessment
None assessed	There could be a forensic assessment of a subtechnique.

ID: T1589.001

Sub-technique of: T1589

ⓘ

Tactic: Reconnaissance

ⓘ

Platforms: PRE

Contributors: Lee Christensen, SpecterOps; Toby Kohlenberg; Vinayak Wadhwa, Lucideus

Version: 1.0

Created: 02 October 2020

Last Modified: 15 April 2021

Schweizerisches Strafgesetzbuch (StGB)

Relevant Articles:

Relevant Forensic Domains:

Provided by LAYER 8

Procedure Examples

ID	Name	Description
G0007	APT28	APT28 has harvested user's login credentials.^[9]
G0114	Chimera	Chimera has collected credentials for the target organization from previous breaches for use in brute force attacks.^[10]
G0065	Leviathan	Leviathan has collected compromised credentials to use for targeting efforts.^[11]
G0059	Magic Hound	Magic Hound gathered credentials from two victims that they then attempted to validate across 75 different websites.^[12]

Mitigations

ID	Mitigation	Description
M1056	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.