Acquire Infrastructure

Adversaries may buy, lease, or rent infrastructure that can be used during targeting. A wide variety of infrastructure exists for hosting and orchestrating adversary operations. Infrastructure solutions include physical or cloud servers, domains, and third-party web services.[1] Additionally, botnets are available for rent or purchase.

Use of these infrastructure solutions allows an adversary to stage, launch, and execute an operation. Solutions may help adversary operations blend in with traffic that is seen as normal, such as contact to third-party web services. Depending on the implementation, adversaries may use infrastructure that makes it difficult to physically tie back to them as well as utilize infrastructure that can be rapidly provisioned, modified, and shut down.

ID: T1583
Platforms: PRE
Version: 1.1
Created: 30 September 2020
Last Modified: 17 October 2021

Mitigations

ID Mitigation 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.

Detection

ID Data Source Data Component
DS0038 Domain Name Active DNS
Domain Registration
Passive DNS
DS0035 Internet Scan Response Content
Response Metadata

Consider use of services that may aid in tracking of newly acquired infrastructure, such as WHOIS databases for domain registration information.

Once adversaries have provisioned infrastructure (ex: a server for use in command and control), internet scans may help proactively discover adversary acquired infrastructure. Consider looking for identifiable patterns such as services listening, certificates in use, SSL/TLS negotiation features, or other response artifacts associated with adversary C2 software.[2][3][4]

Detection efforts may be focused on related stages of the adversary lifecycle, such as during Command and Control.

References