T1552 Unsecured Credentials Mappings

Adversaries may search compromised systems to find and obtain insecurely stored credentials. These credentials can be stored and/or misplaced in many locations on a system, including plaintext files (e.g. Bash History), operating system or application-specific repositories (e.g. Credentials in Registry), or other specialized files/artifacts (e.g. Private Keys).

View in MITRE ATT&CK®

Mappings

Capability ID Capability Description Mapping Type ATT&CK ID ATT&CK Name Notes
AC-16 Security and Privacy Attributes Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
AC-17 Remote Access Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
AC-18 Wireless Access Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
AC-19 Access Control for Mobile Devices Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
AC-02 Account Management Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
AC-20 Use of External Systems Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
AC-03 Access Enforcement Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
AC-04 Information Flow Enforcement Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
AC-05 Separation of Duties Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
AC-06 Least Privilege Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
CA-07 Continuous Monitoring Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
CA-08 Penetration Testing Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
CM-02 Baseline Configuration Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
CM-05 Access Restrictions for Change Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
CM-06 Configuration Settings Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
CM-07 Least Functionality Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
IA-02 Identification and Authentication (organizational Users) Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
IA-03 Device Identification and Authentication Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
IA-04 Identifier Management Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
IA-05 Authenticator Management Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
RA-05 Vulnerability Monitoring and Scanning Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
SA-11 Developer Testing and Evaluation Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
SA-15 Development Process, Standards, and Tools Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
SC-12 Cryptographic Key Establishment and Management Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
SC-28 Protection of Information at Rest Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
SC-04 Information in Shared System Resources Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
SC-07 Boundary Protection Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
SI-10 Information Input Validation Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
SI-12 Information Management and Retention Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
SI-15 Information Output Filtering Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
SI-02 Flaw Remediation Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
SI-04 System Monitoring Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
SI-07 Software, Firmware, and Information Integrity Protects T1552 Unsecured Credentials
PUR-IP-E5 Information Protection Technique Scores T1552 Unsecured Credentials
Comments
Defender for Cloud Apps file policies allow you to enforce a wide range of automated processes. Policies can be set to provide Information Protection, including continuous compliance scans, legal eDiscovery tasks, and DLP for sensitive content shared publicly. Information Protection Detects Unsecured Credential attacks due to it detecting and encrypting files containing personally identifying information and other sensitive data that is shared in a cloud app and applying sensitivity labels to limit access only to employees in your company. License Requirements: Microsoft Defender for Office 365 plan 1 and plan 2
References
PUR-AS-E5 Audit Solutions Technique Scores T1552 Unsecured Credentials
Comments
Microsoft Purview auditing solutions provide an integrated solution to help organizations effectively respond to security events, forensic investigations, internal investigations, and compliance obligations. Thousands of user and admin operations performed in dozens of Microsoft 365 services and solutions are captured, recorded, and retained in your organization's unified audit log. Audit records for these events are searchable by security ops, IT admins, insider risk teams, and compliance and legal investigators in your organization. This capability provides visibility into the activities performed across your Microsoft 365 organization. Microsoft's Audit Solutions protects from Unsecured Credential attacks due to Audit Solutions providing the visibility to allow admins to preemptively search for files containing passwords or other credentials and take actions to reduce the exposure risk when found. License Requirements: Microsoft 365 E3 and E5
References
DEF-IR-E5 Incident Response Technique Scores T1552 Unsecured Credentials
Comments
An incident in Microsoft Defender XDR is a collection of correlated alerts and associated data that make up the story of an attack. Microsoft 365 services and apps create alerts when they detect a suspicious or malicious event or activity. Individual alerts provide valuable clues about a completed or ongoing attack. Attacks typically employ various techniques against different types of entities, such as devices, users, and mailboxes. The result of this is multiple alerts for multiple entities in your tenant. Piecing the individual alerts together to gain insight into an attack can be challenging and time-consuming, Microsoft Defender XDR automatically aggregates the alerts and their associated information into an incident. A typical Incident Response workflow in Microsoft Defender XDR begins with a triage action, next is the investigate action, and finally is the response action. Microsoft 365 Defender Incident Response responds to unsecure credential attacks due to Incident Response monitoring for newly executed processes, suspicious file access activity, and application logs for activity that may highlight malicious attempts to access application data. License Requirements: Microsoft Defender XDR
References
DO365-ATH-E5 Advanced Threat Hunting Technique Scores T1552 Unsecured Credentials
Comments
Advanced hunting is a query-based threat hunting tool that lets you explore up to 30 days of raw data. Advanced hunting in Microsoft Defender XDR allows you to proactively hunt for threats across: Devices managed by Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Emails processed by Microsoft 365, Cloud app activities, authentication events, and domain controller activities. With this level of visibility, you can quickly hunt for threats that traverse sections of your network, including sophisticated intrusions that arrive on email or the web, elevate local privileges, acquire privileged domain credentials, and move laterally to across your devices. Advanced hunting supports two modes, guided and advanced. Users use advanced mode if they are comfortable using Kusto Query Language (KQL) to create queries from scratch. Advanced Threat Hunting Detects Unsecured Credentials attacks due to the IdentityLogonEvents table in the advanced hunting schema which contains information about all authentication activities related to Microsoft online services captured by Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps. License Requirements: Microsoft Defender XDR, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Microsoft Defender for Office 365 plan 2
References

ATT&CK Subtechniques

Technique ID Technique Name Number of Mappings
T1552.005 Cloud Instance Metadata API 14
T1552.002 Credentials in Registry 18
T1552.004 Private Keys 23
T1552.003 Bash History 4
T1552.001 Credentials In Files 18
T1552.006 Group Policy Preferences 13
T1552.008 Chat Messages 5
T1552.007 Container API 14