- Tactics
- Command and Control
- Platforms
- ESXi, Linux, macOS, Windows
- Reference
- attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1132.002
Description
Adversaries may encode data with a non-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 non-standard data encoding system that diverges from existing protocol specifications. Non-standard data encoding schemes may be based on or related to standard data encoding schemes, such as a modified Base64 encoding for the message body of an HTTP request.(Citation: Wikipedia Binary-to-text Encoding)(Citation: Wikipedia Character Encoding)
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