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MITRE ATT&CK® Technique

T1560.001: Archive via Utility

Adversaries may use utilities to compress and/or encrypt collected data prior to exfiltration. Many utilities include functionalities to compress, encrypt, or otherwise package data into a format that is easier/more secure to transport.

Adversaries may abuse various utilities to compress or encrypt data before exfiltration. Some third party utilities may be preinstalled, such as tar on Linux and macOS or zip on Windows systems.

On Windows, diantz or makecab may be used to package collected files into a cabinet (.cab) file. diantz may also be used to download and compress files from remote locations (i.e. Remote Data Staging).[1] xcopy on Windows can copy files and directories with a variety of options. Additionally, adversaries may use certutil to Base64 encode collected data before exfiltration.

Adversaries may use also third party utilities, such as 7-Zip, WinRAR, and WinZip, to perform similar activities.[2][3][4]

EnterpriseT1560.001Sub-techniqueObject v1.3 Modified
Glexia's Take

Analyst context for executives and security teams

Analyst confidence High

Archive via Utility matters because it is a common pre-exfiltration behavior: collected files are compressed, encrypted, encoded, or packaged so they are easier to move and harder to inspect. For leaders, the risk is not the archive tool itself—many are legitimate—but whether the organization can distinguish normal backup, admin, and user compression from suspicious collection activity across Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Executive priority

Prioritize this as a data-loss and incident-readiness control question. Executives should ask whether SOC and IR teams can prove visibility into archive creation on endpoints, especially around sensitive file stores and privileged systems, and whether audit evidence supports compliance claims about monitoring data access and movement. Because ATT&CK links this behavior to multiple campaigns and groups, it is a durable tradecraft pattern, but local risk depends on where valuable data resides and what audit logging is actually retained.

Technical view

This is a collection-stage sub-technique of Archive Collected Data for Linux, macOS, and Windows. Validate process and command-line visibility for native and third-party utilities named in the ATT&CK description, including tar, zip, diantz, makecab, xcopy, certutil, 7-Zip, WinRAR, and WinZip. Detection should focus on archive or encoded file creation following access to collected data, unusual parent processes, execution from unexpected paths, high-volume file reads, and staging activity before possible exfiltration. ATT&CK provides no official detection text here, but the relationship to DET0298 indicates a detection strategy exists; its detailed logic was not supplied in the object data.

Likely telemetry

  • Endpoint process creation with full command line and parent/child process context
  • File creation, rename, and write events for archive or package formats such as ZIP, RAR, 7z, CAB, and encoded outputs
  • File access/read activity from sensitive repositories, user profile directories, shared drives, source code, research, or operational data locations
  • Windows audit data for diantz, makecab, xcopy, and certutil execution where available
  • Linux/macOS shell and process telemetry for tar and zip usage

Detection direction

  • Baseline legitimate compression workflows such as backups, software packaging, log rotation, and administrative transfers to reduce false positives.
  • Correlate archive utility execution with preceding bulk file access and subsequent staging or outbound network activity rather than alerting on utility execution alone.
  • Pay attention to living-off-the-land utilities identified by ATT&CK, including diantz, makecab, xcopy, and certutil, because they may blend into normal Windows environments.
  • Tune for unusual archive creation locations, unexpected users, rare command-line options, and activity on systems that normally should not package large volumes of data.
  • Confirm coverage across Linux, macOS, and Windows; this behavior is cross-platform and blind spots often come from uneven endpoint telemetry.

Mitigation priorities

  • Start with M1047 Audit: ensure systems record relevant process, file, user, and system activity needed to identify anomalous archive creation and review it systematically.
  • Validate audit policy coverage and retention before an incident, especially on endpoints and servers that store sensitive or regulated data.
  • Maintain an inventory of approved archive utilities and expected business use so SOC teams can separate normal operations from suspicious packaging behavior.
  • Review whether third-party compression tools are necessary on high-value systems and ensure their use is visible to monitoring teams.
  • Include archive-creation evidence in incident response playbooks for suspected data collection or exfiltration cases.
Analyst notes and limits

The most important defensive decision is whether telemetry can connect three events: access to valuable data, creation of an archive or encoded package, and later movement or attempted movement. ATT&CK relationships show this behavior has been used by numerous campaigns and groups, including Operation Honeybee, FunnyDream, Operation CuckooBees, Operation Wocao, SolarWinds Compromise, APT28-related activity, Turla, APT1, APT3, Ke3chang, and others, but those relationships should be used for prioritization and threat-informed validation rather than attribution.

The official ATT&CK detection field for this object is not provided, and detailed DET0298 content was not supplied. The object supports Linux, macOS, and Windows, but it does not specify cloud control-plane telemetry or vendor-specific detections. Local environment baselines, data locations, logging configuration, and retention are required to determine actual coverage and risk.

Official MITRE ATT&CK definition

Archive via Utility

Adversaries may use utilities to compress and/or encrypt collected data prior to exfiltration. Many utilities include functionalities to compress, encrypt, or otherwise package data into a format that is easier/more secure to transport.

Adversaries may abuse various utilities to compress or encrypt data before exfiltration. Some third party utilities may be preinstalled, such as tar on Linux and macOS or zip on Windows systems.

On Windows, diantz or makecab may be used to package collected files into a cabinet (.cab) file. diantz may also be used to download and compress files from remote locations (i.e. Remote Data Staging).[1] xcopy on Windows can copy files and directories with a variety of options. Additionally, adversaries may use certutil to Base64 encode collected data before exfiltration.

Adversaries may use also third party utilities, such as 7-Zip, WinRAR, and WinZip, to perform similar activities.[2][3][4]

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.

ATT&CK relationship table

Related techniques

This mirrors the MITRE pattern of making group, software, campaign, and technique relationships scannable. Relationship notes come from mirrored ATT&CK relationship text when available.

1 rows
Domain ID Name Relationship / procedure
Enterprise T1560 Archive Collected Data This object subtechnique of Archive Collected Data.
Associated objects

Groups, software, and campaigns

Group Enterprise

G0125: HAFNIUM

HAFNIUM is a likely state-sponsored cyber espionage group operating out of China that has been active since at least January 2021. HAFNIUM primarily targets entities in the US across a number of industry sectors, including infectious disease researchers, law firms, higher education institutions, defense contractors, policy think tanks, and NGOs. HAFNIUM has targeted remote management tools and cloud software for intial access and has demonstrated an ability to quickly operationalize exploits for identified vulnerabilities in edge devices.[1][2][3]

Group Enterprise

G0045: menuPass

menuPass is a threat group that has been active since at least 2006. Individual members of menuPass are known to have acted in association with the Chinese Ministry of State Security's (MSS) Tianjin State Security Bureau and worked for the Huaying Haitai Science and Technology Development Company.[1][2]

menuPass has targeted healthcare, defense, aerospace, finance, maritime, biotechnology, energy, and government sectors globally, with an emphasis on Japanese organizations. In 2016 and 2017, the group is known to have targeted managed IT service providers (MSPs), manufacturing and mining companies, and a university.[3][4][5][6][7][1][2]

Group Enterprise

G0102: Wizard Spider

Wizard Spider is a Russia-based financially motivated threat group originally known for the creation and deployment of TrickBot since at least 2016. Wizard Spider possesses a diverse arsenal of tools and has conducted ransomware campaigns against a variety of organizations, ranging from major corporations to hospitals.[1][2][3]

Group Enterprise

G0064: APT33

APT33 is a suspected Iranian threat group that has carried out operations since at least 2013. The group has targeted organizations across multiple industries in the United States, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea, with a particular interest in the aviation and energy sectors.[1][2]

Group Enterprise

G0117: Fox Kitten

Fox Kitten is threat actor with a suspected nexus to the Iranian government that has been active since at least 2017 against entities in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, Australia, and North America. Fox Kitten has targeted multiple industrial verticals including oil and gas, technology, government, defense, healthcare, manufacturing, and engineering.[1][2][3][4]

Group Enterprise

G0052: CopyKittens

CopyKittens is an Iranian cyber espionage group that has been operating since at least 2013. It has targeted countries including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the U.S., Jordan, and Germany. The group is responsible for the campaign known as Operation Wilted Tulip.[1][2][3]

Group Enterprise

G1017: Volt Typhoon

Volt Typhoon is a People's Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored actor that has been active since at least 2021, primarily targeting critical infrastructure organizations in the US and its territories including Guam. Volt Typhoon's targeting and pattern of behavior have been assessed as pre-positioning to enable lateral movement to operational technology (OT) assets for potential destructive or disruptive attacks. Volt Typhoon has emphasized stealth in operations using web shells, living-off-the-land (LOTL) binaries, hands on keyboard activities, and stolen credentials.[1][2][3][4]. The group has leveraged compromised SOHO routers to proxy command and control traffic and obscure its infrastructure, activity associated with the KV botnet.[5].

Reporting indicates a separate initial access cluster, SYLVANITE, has been observed exploiting internet-facing edge devices and transferring access to Volt Typhoon, also tracked as VOLTZITE, for follow-on operations. [6]

Group Enterprise

G0006: APT1

APT1 is a Chinese threat group that has been attributed to the 2nd Bureau of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) General Staff Department’s (GSD) 3rd Department, commonly known by its Military Unit Cover Designator (MUCD) as Unit 61398. [1]

Group Enterprise

G0129: Mustang Panda

Mustang Panda is a China-based cyber espionage threat actor that has been conducting operations since at least 2012. Mustang Panda has been known to use tailored phishing lures and decoy documents to deliver malicious payloads. Mustang Panda has targeted government, diplomatic, and non-governmental organizations, including think tanks, religious institutions, and research entities, across the United States, Europe, and Asia, with notable activity in Russia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Vietnam. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]

Group Enterprise

G1040: Play

Play is a ransomware group that has been active since at least 2022 deploying Playcrypt ransomware against the business, government, critical infrastructure, healthcare, and media sectors in North America, South America, and Europe. Play actors employ a double-extortion model, encrypting systems after exfiltrating data, and are presumed by security researchers to operate as a closed group.[1][2]

Group Enterprise

G0114: Chimera

Chimera is a suspected China-based threat group that has been active since at least 2018 targeting the semiconductor industry in Taiwan as well as data from the airline industry.[1][2]

Group Enterprise

G0084: Gallmaker

Gallmaker is a cyberespionage group that has targeted victims in the Middle East and has been active since at least December 2017. The group has mainly targeted victims in the defense, military, and government sectors.[1]

Tool Enterprise

S0160: certutil

certutil is a command-line utility that can be used to obtain certificate authority information and configure Certificate Services. [1]

Windows
Malware Enterprise

S9010: GlassWorm

GlassWorm is a worm that propagated through supply chain attacks by compromising repository credentials from victim environments and having malicious payloads added to those compromised accounts for distribution to victims across the various development ecosystems.[1][2][3] GlassWorm has numerous variants, including Rust binaries, encrypted JavaScript and a variant leveraging invisible Unicode characters that made reverse engineering difficult.[4][1][5] GlassWorm has employed a unique command and control (C2) methodology using Solana blockchain.[6][1] GlassWorm was first reported in October 2025.[6][1][3]

macOSWindows
Malware Enterprise

S1043: ccf32

ccf32 is data collection malware that has been used since at least February 2019, most notably during the FunnyDream campaign; there is also a similar x64 version.[1]

Windows
Malware Enterprise

S0260: InvisiMole

InvisiMole is a modular spyware program that has been used by the InvisiMole Group since at least 2013. InvisiMole has two backdoor modules called RC2FM and RC2CL that are used to perform post-exploitation activities. It has been discovered on compromised victims in the Ukraine and Russia. Gamaredon Group infrastructure has been used to download and execute InvisiMole against a small number of victims.[1][2]

Windows
Malware Enterprise

S0187: Daserf

Daserf is a backdoor that has been used to spy on and steal from Japanese, South Korean, Russian, Singaporean, and Chinese victims. Researchers have identified versions written in both Visual C and Delphi. [1] [2]

Windows
Tool Enterprise

S0378: PoshC2

PoshC2 is an open source remote administration and post-exploitation framework that is publicly available on GitHub. The server-side components of the tool are primarily written in Python, while the implants are written in PowerShell. Although PoshC2 is primarily focused on Windows implantation, it does contain a basic Python dropper for Linux/macOS.[1]

WindowsLinuxmacOS
Malware Enterprise

S1246: BeaverTail

BeaverTail is a malware that has both a JavaScript and C++ variant. Active since 2022, BeaverTail is capable of stealing logins from browsers and serves as a downloader for second stage payloads. BeaverTail has previously been leveraged by North Korea-affiliated actors identified as DeceptiveDevelopment or Contagious Interview. BeaverTail has been delivered to victims through code repository sites and has been embedded within malicious attachments.[1][2][3][4]

LinuxmacOSWindows
Campaign Enterprise

C0012: Operation CuckooBees

Operation CuckooBees was a cyber espionage campaign targeting technology and manufacturing companies in East Asia, Western Europe, and North America since at least 2019. Security researchers noted the goal of Operation CuckooBees, which was still ongoing as of May 2022, was likely the theft of proprietary information, research and development documents, source code, and blueprints for various technologies. Researchers assessed Operation CuckooBees was conducted by actors affiliated with Winnti Group, APT41, and BARIUM.[1]

Campaign Enterprise

C0051: APT28 Nearest Neighbor Campaign

APT28 Nearest Neighbor Campaign was conducted by APT28 from early February 2022 to November 2024 against organizations and individuals with expertise on Ukraine. APT28 primarily leveraged living-off-the-land techniques, while leveraging the zero-day exploitation of CVE-2022-38028. Notably, APT28 leveraged Wi-Fi networks in close proximity to the intended target to gain initial access to the victim environment. By daisy-chaining multiple compromised organizations nearby the intended target, APT28 discovered dual-homed systems (with both a wired and wireless network connection) to enable Wi-Fi and use compromised credentials to connect to the victim network.[1]

Campaign Enterprise

C0063: 2025 Poland Wiper Attacks

2025 Poland Wiper Attacks is a Russian state-sponsored campaign that conducted destructive cyberattacks against Polish energy infrastructure in December 2025. Targets included more than 30 wind and photovoltaic farms, a combined heat and power (CHP) plant, and a manufacturing sector company. The attacks on the distributed energy resources (DER) disrupted communications between affected facilities and the distribution system operator, but did not impact electricity generation or heat supply. Across the campaign, threat actors deployed two previously undocumented wiper tools, DynoWiper, a Windows-based wiper and LazyWiper, a PowerShell wiper, distributed via malicious Group Policy Objects. At the CHP plant, threat actors had maintained access since at least March 2025, using that foothold to obtain credentials and move laterally before attempting wiper deployment. Some reporting has assessed the activity to be consistent with Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) threat activity group Dragonfly, also tracked as STATIC TUNDRA, while other reporting attributes the destructive wiper activities to the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) threat activity group ELECTRUM, also tracked as Sandworm Team.[1][2][3][4]

Campaign Enterprise

C0014: Operation Wocao

Operation Wocao was a cyber espionage campaign that targeted organizations around the world, including in Brazil, China, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The suspected China-based actors compromised government organizations and managed service providers, as well as aviation, construction, energy, finance, health care, insurance, offshore engineering, software development, and transportation companies.[1]

Security researchers assessed the Operation Wocao actors used similar TTPs and tools as APT20, suggesting a possible overlap. Operation Wocao was named after an observed command line entry by one of the threat actors, possibly out of frustration from losing webshell access.[1]

Campaign Enterprise

C0007: FunnyDream

FunnyDream was a suspected Chinese cyber espionage campaign that targeted government and foreign organizations in Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam, and other parts of Southeast Asia. Security researchers linked the FunnyDream campaign to possible Chinese-speaking threat actors through the use of the Chinoxy backdoor and noted infrastructure overlap with the TAG-16 threat group.[1][2][3]

Campaign Enterprise

C0006: Operation Honeybee

Operation Honeybee was a campaign that targeted humanitarian aid and inter-Korean affairs organizations from at least late 2017 through early 2018. Operation Honeybee initially targeted South Korea, but expanded to include Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, Indonesia, Argentina, and Canada. Security researchers assessed the threat actors were likely Korean speakers based on metadata used in both lure documents and executables, and named the campaign "Honeybee" after the author name discovered in malicious Word documents.[1]

Campaign Enterprise

C0029: Cutting Edge

Cutting Edge was a campaign conducted by suspected China-nexus espionage actors, variously identified as UNC5221/UTA0178 and UNC5325, that began as early as December 2023 with the exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities in Ivanti Connect Secure (previously Pulse Secure) VPN appliances. Cutting Edge targeted the U.S. defense industrial base and multiple sectors globally including telecommunications, financial, aerospace, and technology. Cutting Edge featured the use of defense evasion and living-off-the-land (LoTL) techniques along with the deployment of web shells and other custom malware.[1][2][3][4][5]

Relationship explorer

All related ATT&CK context

Mitigations

Mitigation direction

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
1.3
Created
Modified
Raw hash
b58de37c44512b13...
Imported snapshots across ATT&CK releases (1)
Release Bundle imported Object version Modified Status Raw hash
19.1 1.3 Current bundle b58de37c4451…
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]
    diantz.exe_lolbas

    Living Off The Land Binaries, Scripts and Libraries (LOLBAS). (n.d.). Diantz.exe. Retrieved October 25, 2021.

    Open source URL
  2. [2]
    7zip Homepage

    I. Pavlov. (2019). 7-Zip. Retrieved February 20, 2020.

    Open source URL
  3. [3]
    WinRAR Homepage

    A. Roshal. (2020). RARLAB. Retrieved February 20, 2020.

    Open source URL
  4. [4]
    WinZip Homepage

    Corel Corporation. (2020). WinZip. Retrieved February 20, 2020.

    Open source URL
  5. [5]
    Wikipedia File Header Signatures

    Wikipedia. (2016, March 31). List of file signatures. Retrieved April 22, 2016.

    Open source URL
  6. [6]
    mitre-attack T1560.001
    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.