T1589.002: Email Addresses

Adversaries may gather email addresses that can be used during targeting. Even if internal instances exist, organizations may have public-facing email infrastructure and addresses for employees.

Adversaries may easily gather email addresses, since they may be readily available and exposed via online or other accessible data sets (ex: Social Media or Search Victim-Owned Websites). Email addresses could also be enumerated via more active means (i.e. Active Scanning), such as probing and analyzing responses from authentication services that may reveal valid usernames in a system. For example, adversaries may be able to enumerate email addresses in Office 365 environments by querying a variety of publicly available API endpoints, such as autodiscover and GetCredentialType.

Gathering this information may reveal opportunities for other forms of reconnaissance (ex: Search Open Websites/Domains or Phishing for Information), establishing operational resources (ex: Email Accounts), and/or initial access (ex: Phishing or Brute Force via External Remote Services).

Positive Technologies products that cover the technique

Detection

PT AF can detect data leaks containing email addresses and occurring over HTTP.

Examples of detection rules:

exchange_active_sync
lync_address_book_reading
exchange_oab_reading.

Detection

ID	DS0029	Data source and component	Network Traffic: Network Traffic Content	Description	Monitor for suspicious network traffic that could be indicative of probing for email addresses and/or usernames, such as large/iterative quantities of authentication requests originating from a single source (especially if the source is known to be associated with an adversary/botnet). Analyzing web metadata may also reveal artifacts that can be attributed to potentially malicious activity, such as referer or user-agent string HTTP/S fields.

ID	Data source and component	Description
DS0029	Network Traffic: Network Traffic Content	Monitor for suspicious network traffic that could be indicative of probing for email addresses and/or usernames, such as large/iterative quantities of authentication requests originating from a single source (especially if the source is known to be associated with an adversary/botnet). Analyzing web metadata may also reveal artifacts that can be attributed to potentially malicious activity, such as referer or user-agent string HTTP/S fields.

Mitigation

ID	M1056	Name	Pre-compromise	Description	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.

ID	Name	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.