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T1195 Supply Chain Compromise

Adversaries may manipulate products or product delivery mechanisms prior to receipt by a final consumer for the purpose of data or system compromise.

Supply chain compromise can take place at any stage of the supply chain including:

  • Manipulation of development tools
  • Manipulation of a development environment
  • Manipulation of source code repositories (public or private)
  • Manipulation of source code in open-source dependencies
  • Manipulation of software update/distribution mechanisms
  • Compromised/infected system images (multiple cases of removable media infected at the factory)35
  • Replacement of legitimate software with modified versions
  • Sales of modified/counterfeit products to legitimate distributors
  • Shipment interdiction

While supply chain compromise can impact any component of hardware or software, adversaries looking to gain execution have often focused on malicious additions to legitimate software in software distribution or update channels.172 Targeting may be specific to a desired victim set or malicious software may be distributed to a broad set of consumers but only move on to additional tactics on specific victims.412 Popular open source projects that are used as dependencies in many applications may also be targeted as a means to add malicious code to users of the dependency.6

Item Value
ID T1195
Sub-techniques T1195.001, T1195.002, T1195.003
Tactics TA0001
Platforms Linux, Windows, macOS
Version 1.5
Created 18 April 2018
Last Modified 30 March 2023

Mitigations

ID Mitigation Description
M1051 Update Software A patch management process should be implemented to check unused dependencies, unmaintained and/or previously vulnerable dependencies, unnecessary features, components, files, and documentation.
M1016 Vulnerability Scanning Continuous monitoring of vulnerability sources and the use of automatic and manual code review tools should also be implemented as well.8

Detection

ID Data Source Data Component
DS0022 File File Metadata
DS0013 Sensor Health Host Status

References

  1. Avast Threat Intelligence Team. (2018, March 8). New investigations into the CCleaner incident point to a possible third stage that had keylogger capacities. Retrieved March 15, 2018. ↩↩

  2. Command Five Pty Ltd. (2011, September). SK Hack by an Advanced Persistent Threat. Retrieved April 6, 2018. ↩↩

  3. IBM Support. (2017, April 26). Storwize USB Initialization Tool may contain malicious code. Retrieved May 28, 2019. ↩

  4. O’Gorman, G., and McDonald, G.. (2012, September 6). The Elderwood Project. Retrieved February 15, 2018. ↩

  5. Schneider Electric. (2018, August 24). Security Notification – USB Removable Media Provided With Conext Combox and Conext Battery Monitor. Retrieved May 28, 2019. ↩

  6. Trendmicro. (2018, November 29). Hacker Infects Node.js Package to Steal from Bitcoin Wallets. Retrieved April 10, 2019. ↩

  7. Windows Defender Research. (2018, March 7). Behavior monitoring combined with machine learning spoils a massive Dofoil coin mining campaign. Retrieved March 20, 2018. ↩

  8. OWASP. (2018, February 23). OWASP Top Ten Project. Retrieved April 3, 2018. ↩