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MITRE ATT&CK® Analytic

AN0449: Analytic 0449

Monitor for excessive or anomalous MFA push notifications or token requests, especially when login attempts originate from unusual IPs or geolocations and do not correspond to legitimate user-initiated sessions.

EnterpriseAN0449AnalyticObject v1.0 Modified
Glexia's Take

Analyst context for executives and security teams

Analyst confidence Medium

This analytic matters because abnormal MFA push notifications or token requests can signal identity pressure against users before a full account compromise is confirmed. For leaders, the practical question is whether the organization can see and investigate suspicious MFA activity in the identity provider, especially when requests come from unusual IP addresses or geolocations and do not match a real user-initiated sign-in.

Executive priority

Prioritize this as an identity and access management readiness check. MFA is often treated as a control, but this analytic tests whether MFA events themselves are monitored as security telemetry. Executives should ask whether the SOC can identify excessive or anomalous MFA prompts, correlate them with unusual source locations, and provide evidence for incident response and audit reviews.

Technical view

For SOC and detection teams, validate that identity provider logs capture MFA push notifications, token requests, login attempts, source IPs, geolocation context, user identity, timestamps, and session outcomes. Detection should focus on excessive or anomalous MFA activity, especially where the activity originates from unusual IPs or geolocations and lacks evidence of a legitimate user-initiated session. Because no ATT&CK tactic or relationship context is supplied, treat this as an identity-provider detection analytic rather than mapping it to a broader intrusion chain without local evidence.

Likely telemetry

  • Identity provider authentication logs
  • MFA push notification events
  • MFA token request events
  • Login attempt records
  • Source IP address and geolocation enrichment

Detection direction

  • Baseline normal MFA request frequency per user, group, role, and geography before setting alert thresholds.
  • Correlate MFA prompts or token requests with interactive login attempts and session creation to identify requests that do not match legitimate user activity.
  • Tune alerts for unusual IPs or geolocations, while accounting for travel, VPNs, remote work, and known corporate egress points.
  • Review whether failed, denied, expired, and repeated MFA events are retained and searchable in the identity provider logs.
  • Avoid assuming compromise from volume alone; require analyst review of user context, source location, timing, and session outcome.

Mitigation priorities

  • Ensure identity provider logging is enabled for MFA prompts, token requests, login attempts, source IPs, geolocation, and session outcomes.
  • Define response procedures for suspicious MFA activity, including user verification, session review, and account risk assessment.
  • Use this analytic to validate MFA monitoring coverage during compliance readiness and incident response exercises.
  • Review MFA policies and exception handling so high-risk users and unusual access patterns receive appropriate scrutiny.
  • Periodically test whether SOC workflows can triage anomalous MFA activity using available identity telemetry.
Analyst notes and limits

The supplied object is a detection analytic, AN0449, for the Identity Provider platform. Its value is strongest when used as a control-validation question: can defenders observe excessive or anomalous MFA push notifications or token requests and relate them to source location and legitimate session activity? No relationship context was supplied, so broader technique, actor, or campaign conclusions should not be inferred from this object alone.

ATT&CK provides a short description and no official detection details, tactics, relationships, aliases, or labels for this analytic. Local identity provider schema, MFA method, retention, geolocation quality, VPN usage, and user behavior baselines are required to operationalize it reliably.

Official MITRE ATT&CK definition

Analytic 0449

Monitor for excessive or anomalous MFA push notifications or token requests, especially when login attempts originate from unusual IPs or geolocations and do not correspond to legitimate user-initiated sessions.

View the same entry on attack.mitre.org (MITRE-hosted reference; in-page links above use the Glexia ATT&CK library.)

Glexia analysis

How security teams should use this page

Treat this object as behavior context, not an attribution claim. Validate the related groups, software, data sources, and mitigations against official ATT&CK relationships and your own telemetry before making control-coverage decisions.

Relationship explorer

All related ATT&CK context

No relationships are available in the current normalized data for this object.

Change history

Object version and sync metadata

The fields below describe the current mirrored snapshot. When Glexia retains multiple ATT&CK source imports, you can open the table to compare the same object across releases (hashes and MITRE timestamps). For MITRE’s own release notes and roadmap, see ATT&CK resources — Updates .

ATT&CK release
19.1
Object version
1.0
Created
Modified
Raw hash
7a07ec62f06130d2...
Imported snapshots across ATT&CK releases (1)
Release Bundle imported Object version Modified Status Raw hash
19.1 1.0 Current bundle 7a07ec62f061…
Raw source

Mirrored ATT&CK source object

The raw object is retained through the mirrored ATT&CK source bundle and object hash. The raw endpoint returns the exact object from the mirrored bundle when available.

Source references

External references and citations

MITRE external references are preserved separately from Glexia analysis so citations remain traceable to their original source records.

  1. [1]
    mitre-attack AN0449
    Open source URL
Source and licensing

Source: MITRE ATT&CK®. © 2026 The MITRE Corporation. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of The MITRE Corporation. MITRE ATT&CK and ATT&CK are registered trademarks of The MITRE Corporation. Glexia is not affiliated with or endorsed by MITRE.