Gather Victim Identity Information: Employee Names

Adversaries may gather employee names that can be used during targeting. Employee names be used to derive email addresses as well as to help guide other reconnaissance efforts and/or craft more-believable lures.

Adversaries may easily gather employee names, since they may be readily available and exposed via online or other accessible data sets (ex: Social Media or Search Victim-Owned Websites).[1] Gathering this information may reveal opportunities for other forms of reconnaissance (ex: Search Open Websites/Domains or Phishing for Information), establishing operational resources (ex: Compromise Accounts), and/or initial access (ex: Phishing or Valid Accounts).

ID: T1589.003
Sub-technique of:  T1589
Tactic: Reconnaissance
Platforms: PRE
Version: 1.0
Created: 02 October 2020
Last Modified: 15 April 2021

Procedure Examples

ID Name Description
G0094 Kimsuky

Kimsuky has collected victim employee name information.[2]

G0034 Sandworm Team

Sandworm Team's research of potential victim organizations included the identification and collection of employee information.[3]

G0122 Silent Librarian

Silent Librarian has collected lists of names for individuals from targeted organizations.[4]

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. Efforts should focus on minimizing the amount and sensitivity of data available to external parties.

Detection

Much of this activity may have a very high occurrence and associated false positive rate, as well as potentially taking place outside the visibility of the target organization, making detection difficult for defenders.

Detection efforts may be focused on related stages of the adversary lifecycle, such as during Initial Access.

References