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ATT&CK Technique

Employee Names

T1589.003 · reconnaissance

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).

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).

PRE
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Actors Using This

2
north_koreaContagious Interview
north_koreaKimsuky
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Mitigations

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MITRE ATT&CK mitigations - vendor-agnostic guidance for reducing exposure to this technique.
M1056Pre-compromise

Pre-compromise mitigations involve proactive measures and defenses implemented to prevent adversaries from successfully identifying and exploiting weaknesses during the Reconnaissance and Resource Development phases of an attack. These activities focus on reducing an organization's attack surface, identify adversarial preparation efforts, and increase the difficulty for attackers to conduct successful operations.

Limit Information Exposure
  • Regularly audit and sanitize publicly available data, including job posts, websites, and social media.
  • Use tools like OSINT monitoring platforms (e.g., SpiderFoot, Recon-ng) to identify leaked information.
Protect Domain and DNS Infrastructure
  • Enable DNSSEC and use WHOIS privacy protection.
  • Monitor for domain hijacking or lookalike domains using services like RiskIQ or DomainTools.
External Monitoring
  • Use tools like Shodan, Censys to monitor your external attack surface.
  • Deploy external vulnerability scanners to proactively address weaknesses.
Threat Intelligence
  • Leverage platforms like MISP, Recorded Future, or Anomali to track adversarial infrastructure, tools, and activity.
Content and Email Protections
  • Use email security solutions like Proofpoint, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, or Mimecast.
  • Enforce SPF/DKIM/DMARC policies to protect against email spoofing.
Training and Awareness
  • Educate employees on identifying phishing attempts, securing their social media, and avoiding information leaks.
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Detection Coverage

0/6 layers
Coverage across standard detection surfaces. Rows marked none have no rule of that type mapped. Some are real blind spots worth closing; others are simply not applicable to this technique (e.g. YARA matches malware files, not network behaviour).
Behavioral / log (Sigma) none
Analytics (MITRE CAR) none
Runtime / container (Falco) none
File / malware (YARA) none
Network (Suricata/Snort) none
Vuln scan (Nuclei) none
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