AN1619: Analytic 1619
Account discovery via VBA macros, COM objects, or embedded scripting.
Analyst context for executives and security teams
This analytic concerns attempts to discover account information from within an Office Suite context using VBA macros, COM objects, or embedded scripting. For leaders, the significance is that business productivity tools can become a visibility gap: activity that looks like document automation may actually be reconnaissance against identities and accounts. The practical question is whether the organization can distinguish approved Office automation from suspicious account-enumeration behavior.
Executive priority
Prioritize validation where Office documents, macros, and scripting are allowed in business workflows. This behavior matters to identity risk, SOC readiness, and incident response because account discovery can help an intruder understand users, privileges, and targets before taking further action. Executives should ask whether macro governance, Office telemetry, endpoint logging, and identity monitoring produce audit-ready evidence when suspicious discovery occurs.
Technical view
The supplied ATT&CK object is a detection analytic for Office Suite platforms with the description: account discovery via VBA macros, COM objects, or embedded scripting. Because no official detection logic or relationship context is provided, SOC and detection teams should focus on confirming whether they collect evidence of Office-spawned scripting, macro execution, COM automation, and account or directory enumeration activity. Tuning should account for legitimate business macros and administrative automation while elevating unusual Office-originated discovery patterns.
Likely telemetry
- Office macro and document activity logs where available
- Endpoint process creation events showing Office applications launching scripts or automation components
- Script execution telemetry associated with VBA, embedded scripting, or COM object use
- Identity or directory query logs that show account enumeration or account lookup behavior
- File and email security telemetry for Office documents that contain macros or embedded scripting
Detection direction
- Validate whether Office Suite activity is correlated with child process, scripting, COM, and identity-query telemetry.
- Baseline legitimate macro-enabled workflows to reduce false positives from approved finance, operations, or reporting automation.
- Look for unusual Office-originated account lookup behavior, especially when initiated by documents or users that do not normally perform such actions.
- Confirm whether detection content covers embedded scripting and COM object usage, not only obvious macro execution.
- Because ATT&CK provides no official detection text for this analytic, require local testing and environment-specific tuning before treating coverage as reliable.
Mitigation priorities
- Review and restrict macro and embedded scripting use based on business need.
- Apply least-privilege and identity access controls so account discovery yields limited useful information.
- Harden Office automation settings and require trusted sources for macro-enabled content where feasible.
- Ensure endpoint, Office, and identity telemetry are retained and available to SOC and incident response teams.
- Document approved macro and automation use cases to support compliance evidence and faster incident triage.
Analyst notes and limits
This take is based only on the supplied ATT&CK analytic fields. The object identifies Office Suite as the platform and describes account discovery through VBA macros, COM objects, or embedded scripting. No tactics, official detection logic, aliases, labels, or relationships were supplied, so the value is in using the object as a validation prompt for Office, endpoint, and identity telemetry rather than as a complete detection specification.
No official detection guidance, relationship context, or tactic mapping was provided. This summary does not assert active exploitation, attribution, impact, or existing detection coverage. Local environment data is required to determine relevance, false-positive patterns, and control effectiveness.
Analytic 1619
Account discovery via VBA macros, COM objects, or embedded scripting.
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.
All related ATT&CK context
No relationships are available in the current normalized data for this object.
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 .
Imported snapshots across ATT&CK releases (1)
| Release | Bundle imported | Object version | Modified | Status | Raw hash |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 19.1 | 1.0 | Current bundle | c8d8b103e8a4… |
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.
External references and citations
MITRE external references are preserved separately from Glexia analysis so citations remain traceable to their original source records.
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[1]
mitre-attack AN1619Open source URL
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