- Tactics
- Command and Control
- Platforms
- ESXi, Linux, macOS, Windows
- Reference
- attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1132.001
Description
Adversaries may encode data with a standard data encoding system to make the content of command and control traffic more difficult to detect. Command and control (C2) information can be encoded using a standard data encoding system that adheres to existing protocol specifications. Common data encoding schemes include ASCII, Unicode, hexadecimal, Base64, and MIME.(Citation: Wikipedia Binary-to-text Encoding)(Citation: Wikipedia Character Encoding) Some data encoding systems may also result in data compression, such as gzip.
How GTK Cyber trains on this
GTK Cyber's Threat Hunting with Data Science course teaches you to build machine-learning detections for techniques like this across the MITRE ATT&CK framework, including the Command and Control tactic this technique falls under. Practitioner-led, focused on real detections, not memorizing technique IDs.
Related techniques
- T1001 - Data Obfuscation
- T1008 - Fallback Channels
- T1071 - Application Layer Protocol
- T1090 - Proxy
- T1092 - Communication Through Removable Media
- T1095 - Non-Application Layer Protocol
- T1102 - Web Service
- T1104 - Multi-Stage Channels
- T1105 - Ingress Tool Transfer
- T1132 - Data Encoding
- T1205 - Traffic Signaling
- T1219 - Remote Access Tools