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T1606.001 Web Cookies

Adversaries may forge web cookies that can be used to gain access to web applications or Internet services. Web applications and services (hosted in cloud SaaS environments or on-premise servers) often use session cookies to authenticate and authorize user access.

Adversaries may generate these cookies in order to gain access to web resources. This differs from Steal Web Session Cookie and other similar behaviors in that the cookies are new and forged by the adversary, rather than stolen or intercepted from legitimate users. Most common web applications have standardized and documented cookie values that can be generated using provided tools or interfaces.1 The generation of web cookies often requires secret values, such as passwords, Private Keys, or other cryptographic seed values.

Once forged, adversaries may use these web cookies to access resources (Web Session Cookie), which may bypass multi-factor and other authentication protection mechanisms.213

Item Value
ID T1606.001
Sub-techniques T1606.001, T1606.002
Tactics TA0006
Platforms IaaS, Linux, SaaS, Windows, macOS
Version 1.1
Created 17 December 2020
Last Modified 20 September 2021

Procedure Examples

ID Name Description
C0024 SolarWinds Compromise During the SolarWinds Compromise, APT29 bypassed MFA set on OWA accounts by generating a cookie value from a previously stolen secret key.2

Mitigations

ID Mitigation Description
M1047 Audit Administrators should perform an audit of all access lists and the permissions they have been granted to access web applications and services. This should be done extensively on all resources in order to establish a baseline, followed up on with periodic audits of new or updated resources. Suspicious accounts/credentials should be investigated and removed.
M1054 Software Configuration Configure browsers/applications to regularly delete persistent web cookies.

Detection

ID Data Source Data Component
DS0028 Logon Session Logon Session Creation
DS0006 Web Credential Web Credential Usage

References