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T1213.004 Customer Relationship Management Software

Adversaries may leverage Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to mine valuable information. CRM software is used to assist organizations in tracking and managing customer interactions, as well as storing customer data.

Once adversaries gain access to a victim organization, they may mine CRM software for customer data. This may include personally identifiable information (PII) such as full names, emails, phone numbers, and addresses, as well as additional details such as purchase histories and IT support interactions. By collecting this data, an adversary may be able to send personalized Phishing emails, engage in SIM swapping, or otherwise target the organization’s customers in ways that enable financial gain or the compromise of additional organizations.321

CRM software may be hosted on-premises or in the cloud. Information stored in these solutions may vary based on the specific instance or environment. Examples of CRM software include Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, Zoho, Zendesk, and HubSpot.

Item Value
ID T1213.004
Sub-techniques T1213.001, T1213.002, T1213.003, T1213.004, T1213.005, T1213.006
Tactics TA0009
Platforms SaaS
Version 1.0
Created 01 July 2024
Last Modified 15 April 2025

Procedure Examples

ID Name Description
C0059 Salesforce Data Exfiltration During Salesforce Data Exfiltration, threat actors accessed and exfiltrated sensitive information from compromised Salesforce instances.4

Mitigations

ID Mitigation Description
M1047 Audit Consider periodic review of accounts and privileges for critical and sensitive CRM data.
M1054 Software Configuration Consider implementing data retention policies to automate periodically archiving and/or deleting data that is no longer needed.
M1018 User Account Management Enforce the principle of least-privilege. Consider implementing access control mechanisms that include both authentication and authorization.
M1017 User Training Develop and publish policies that define acceptable information to be stored in CRM databases and acceptable handling of customer data. Only store customer information required for business operations.

References

  1. Ionut Ilascu. (2020, January 16). Customer-Owned Bank Informs 100k of Breach Exposing Account Balance, PII. Retrieved July 1, 2024. ↩

  2. Lawrence Abrams. (2021, July 10). Mint Mobile hit by a data breach after numbers ported, data accessed. Retrieved July 1, 2024. ↩

  3. Sergiu Gatlan. (2022, January 4). UScellular discloses data breach after billing system hack. Retrieved July 1, 2024. ↩

  4. Google Threat Intelligence Group. (2025, June 4). The Cost of a Call: From Voice Phishing to Data Extortion. Retrieved October 22, 2025. ↩