T1496 Resource Hijacking

Adversaries may leverage the resources of co-opted systems to complete resource-intensive tasks, which may impact system and/or hosted service availability.

Resource hijacking may take a number of different forms. For example, adversaries may:

  • Leverage compute resources in order to mine cryptocurrency
  • Sell network bandwidth to proxy networks
  • Generate SMS traffic for profit
  • Abuse cloud-based messaging services to send large quantities of spam messages

In some cases, adversaries may leverage multiple types of Resource Hijacking at once.(Citation: Sysdig Cryptojacking Proxyjacking 2023)

View in MITRE ATT&CK®

CSA CCM Mappings

Capability ID Capability Description Mapping Type ATT&CK ID ATT&CK Name Notes
IAM-16 Authorization Mechanisms mitigates T1496 Resource Hijacking
Comments
This control requires both CSP and CSC to independently enforce formal approval processes for user access, implement dynamic and explicit authorization mechanisms. The guidance focuses on implementing technical measures to verify authorization and prevent unauthorized access and execution.
References
    DCS-18 Datacenter Operations Resilience mitigates T1496 Resource Hijacking
    Comments
    Adversaries may leverage the resources of co-opted systems to complete resource-intensive tasks, which may impact system and/or hosted service availability. This control establishes and regularly evaluates processes, procedures, and technical measures to ensure continuous operations of the datacenter, mitigating attacker techniques such as denial‑of‑service and other availability‑impacting attacks that seek to disrupt business and operational continuity.
    References
      DCS-15 Secure Utilities mitigates T1496 Resource Hijacking
      Comments
      Adversaries may leverage the resources of co-opted systems to complete resource-intensive tasks, which may impact system and/or hosted service availability. This control requires securing, monitoring, maintaining, and regularly testing utility services (e.g., power, HVAC, communications) to ensure ongoing effectiveness, mitigating attacker techniques such as disruption of infrastructure, exploitation of unmonitored service failures, and availability attacks that can compromise system resilience.
      References
        AIS-06 Automated Secure Application Deployment mitigates T1496 Resource Hijacking
        Comments
        This control applies to the secure deployments of applications and emphasizes the prevention of misconfigurations and malicious deployment activities. Adversaries may abuse compute resource within a victim's cloud environment by modifying any tenant-wide policies that limit the sizes of deployed virtual machines. Deployment templates and automated rollback can enforce resource quotas, network segmentation, and least‑privilege IAM roles, reducing the ability of a compromised deployment to be repurposed for crypto‑mining or other illicit compute use.
        References

          ATT&CK Subtechniques

          Technique ID Technique Name Number of Mappings
          T1496.002 Bandwidth Hijacking 3
          T1496.004 Cloud Service Hijacking 3
          T1496.001 Compute Hijacking 2