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T1590.001 Domain Properties

Adversaries may gather information about the victim’s network domain(s) that can be used during targeting. Information about domains and their properties may include a variety of details, including what domain(s) the victim owns as well as administrative data (ex: name, registrar, etc.) and more directly actionable information such as contacts (email addresses and phone numbers), business addresses, and name servers.

Adversaries may gather this information in various ways, such as direct collection actions via Active Scanning or Phishing for Information. Information about victim domains and their properties may also be exposed to adversaries via online or other accessible data sets (ex: WHOIS).531 Where third-party cloud providers are in use, this information may also be exposed through publicly available API endpoints, such as GetUserRealm and autodiscover in Office 365 environments.24 Gathering this information may reveal opportunities for other forms of reconnaissance (ex: Search Open Technical Databases, Search Open Websites/Domains, or Phishing for Information), establishing operational resources (ex: Acquire Infrastructure or Compromise Infrastructure), and/or initial access (ex: Phishing).

Item Value
ID T1590.001
Sub-techniques T1590.001, T1590.002, T1590.003, T1590.004, T1590.005, T1590.006
Tactics TA0043
Platforms PRE
Version 1.1
Created 02 October 2020
Last Modified 21 October 2022

Procedure Examples

ID Name Description
S0677 AADInternals AADInternals can gather information about a tenant’s domains using public Microsoft APIs.67
G0034 Sandworm Team Sandworm Team conducted technical reconnaissance of the Parliament of Georgia’s official internet domain prior to its 2019 attack.8

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. CIRCL Computer Incident Response Center. (n.d.). Passive DNS. Retrieved October 20, 2020. ↩

  2. Dr. Nestori Syynimaa. (2020, June 13). Just looking: Azure Active Directory reconnaissance as an outsider. Retrieved May 27, 2022. ↩

  3. Hacker Target. (n.d.). DNS Dumpster. Retrieved October 20, 2020. ↩

  4. Microsoft. (2017, January 23). (Cloud) Tip of the Day: Advanced way to check domain availability for Office 365 and Azure. Retrieved May 27, 2022. ↩

  5. NTT America. (n.d.). Whois Lookup. Retrieved October 20, 2020. ↩

  6. Dr. Nestori Syynimaa. (2018, October 25). AADInternals. Retrieved February 18, 2022. ↩

  7. Dr. Nestori Syynimaa. (2020, June 13). Just looking: Azure Active Directory reconnaissance as an outsider. Retrieved February 1, 2022. ↩

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