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T1589.003 Employee Names

Adversaries may gather employee names that can be used during targeting. Employee names be used to derive email addresses as well as to help guide other reconnaissance efforts and/or craft more-believable lures.

Adversaries may easily gather employee names, since they may be readily available and exposed 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: Search Open Websites/Domains or Phishing for Information), establishing operational resources (ex: Compromise Accounts), and/or initial access (ex: Phishing or Valid Accounts).

Item Value
ID T1589.003
Sub-techniques T1589.001, T1589.002, T1589.003
Tactics TA0043
Platforms PRE
Version 1.0
Created 02 October 2020
Last Modified 15 April 2021

Procedure Examples

ID Name Description
G0094 Kimsuky Kimsuky has collected victim employee name information.2
G0034 Sandworm Team Sandworm Team‘s research of potential victim organizations included the identification and collection of employee information.4
G0122 Silent Librarian Silent Librarian has collected lists of names for individuals from targeted organizations.3

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.

References

  1. Cybersecurity Resource Center. (n.d.). CYBERSECURITY INCIDENTS. Retrieved October 20, 2020. ↩

  2. KISA. (n.d.). Phishing Target Reconnaissance and Attack Resource Analysis Operation Muzabi. Retrieved March 7, 2022. ↩

  3. DOJ. (2018, March 23). U.S. v. Rafatnejad et al . Retrieved February 3, 2021. ↩

  4. Scott W. Brady. (2020, October 15). United States vs. Yuriy Sergeyevich Andrienko et al.. Retrieved November 25, 2020. ↩