Search Victim-Owned Websites (T1594)

Tactic: Reconnaissance

Tactics
Reconnaissance
Platforms
PRE
Reference
attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1594

Description

Adversaries may search websites owned by the victim for information that can be used during targeting. Victim-owned websites may contain a variety of details, including names of departments/divisions, physical locations, and data about key employees such as names, roles, and contact info (ex: Email Addresses). These sites may also have details highlighting business operations and relationships.(Citation: Comparitech Leak)

Adversaries may search victim-owned websites to gather actionable information. Information from these sources may reveal opportunities for other forms of reconnaissance (ex: Phishing for Information or Search Open Technical Databases), establishing operational resources (ex: Establish Accounts or Compromise Accounts), and/or initial access (ex: Trusted Relationship or Phishing).

In addition to manually browsing the website, adversaries may attempt to identify hidden directories or files that could contain additional sensitive information or vulnerable functionality. They may do this through automated activities such as Wordlist Scanning, as well as by leveraging files such as sitemap.xml and robots.txt.(Citation: Perez Sitemap XML 2023)(Citation: Register Robots TXT 2015)

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 Reconnaissance tactic this technique falls under. Practitioner-led, focused on real detections, not memorizing technique IDs.

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