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T1591.002 Business Relationships

Adversaries may gather information about the victim’s business relationships that can be used during targeting. Information about an organization’s business relationships may include a variety of details, including second or third-party organizations/domains (ex: managed service providers, contractors, etc.) that have connected (and potentially elevated) network access. This information may also reveal supply chains and shipment paths for the victim’s hardware and software resources.

Adversaries may gather this information in various ways, such as direct elicitation via Phishing for Information. Information about business relationships may also be exposed to adversaries 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: Phishing for Information or Search Open Websites/Domains), establishing operational resources (ex: Establish Accounts or Compromise Accounts), and/or initial access (ex: Supply Chain Compromise, Drive-by Compromise, or Trusted Relationship).

Item Value
ID T1591.002
Sub-techniques T1591.001, T1591.002, T1591.003, T1591.004
Tactics TA0043
Platforms PRE
Version 1.0
Created 02 October 2020
Last Modified 15 April 2021

Procedure Examples

ID Name Description
G0035 Dragonfly Dragonfly has collected open source information to identify relationships between organizations for targeting purposes.2
G1004 LAPSUS$ LAPSUS$ has gathered detailed knowledge of an organization’s supply chain relationships.4
G0034 Sandworm Team In preparation for its attack against the 2018 Winter Olympics, Sandworm Team conducted online research of partner organizations listed on an official PyeongChang Olympics partnership site.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. Seals, T. (2020, October 15). Broadvoice Leak Exposes 350M Records, Personal Voicemail Transcripts. Retrieved October 20, 2020. ↩

  2. Slowik, J. (2021, October). THE BAFFLING BERSERK BEAR: A DECADE’S ACTIVITY TARGETING CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTURE. Retrieved December 6, 2021. ↩

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

  4. MSTIC, DART, M365 Defender. (2022, March 24). DEV-0537 Criminal Actor Targeting Organizations for Data Exfiltration and Destruction. Retrieved May 17, 2022. ↩