Data from Information Repositories

Sub-techniques (6)

MITRE ATT&CK Content


Adversaries may leverage information repositories to mine valuable information. Information repositories are tools that allow for storage of information, typically to facilitate collaboration or information sharing between users, and can store a wide variety of data that may aid adversaries in further objectives, such as Credential Access, Lateral Movement, or Defense Evasion, or direct access to the target information. Adversaries may also abuse external sharing features to share sensitive documents with recipients outside of the organization (i.e., Transfer Data to Cloud Account [MITRE] ).

The following is a brief list of example information that may hold potential value to an adversary and may also be found on an information repository:

* Policies, procedures, and standards * Physical / logical network diagrams * System architecture diagrams * Technical system documentation * Testing / development credentials (i.e., Unsecured Credentials [MITRE] ) * Work / project schedules * Source code snippets * Links to network shares and other internal resources * Contact or other sensitive information about business partners and customers, including personally identifiable information (PII)

Information stored in a repository may vary based on the specific instance or environment. Specific common information repositories include the following:

* Storage services such as IaaS databases, enterprise databases, and more specialized platforms such as customer relationship management (CRM) databases * Collaboration platforms such as SharePoint, Confluence, and code repositories * Messaging platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams

In some cases, information repositories have been improperly secured, typically by unintentionally allowing for overly-broad access by all users or even public access to unauthenticated users. This is particularly common with cloud-native or cloud-hosted services, such as AWS Relational Database Service (RDS), Redis, or ElasticSearch.

Detection

ID Data Source Data Component Description
DS0028 Logon Session Logon Session Creation Monitor for newly constructed logon behavior within Microsoft’s SharePoint can be configured to report access to certain pages and documents. SharePoint audit logging can also be configured to report when a user shares a resource. The user access logging within Altassian’s Confluence can also be configured to report access to certain pages and documents through AccessLogFilter. In AWS environments, GuardDuty can be configured to report suspicious login activity in RDS. Additional log storage and analysis infrastructure will likely be required for more robust detection capabilities.

Mitigation

ID Mitigation Description
M1047 Audit Consider periodic review of accounts and privileges for critical and sensitive repositories. Ensure that repositories such as cloud-hosted databases are not unintentionally exposed to the public, and that security groups assigned to them permit only necessary and authorized hosts.

References

Technique Information

ID: T1213
Aliases: T1213
Sub-techniques:
Tactics:
  • Collection
Created: 13 Sep 2024
Last Modified: 03 Jun 2025