T1583.004: Server
Adversaries may buy, lease, rent, or obtain physical servers that can be used during targeting. Use of servers allows an adversary to stage, launch, and execute an operation. During post-compromise activity, adversaries may utilize servers for various tasks, such as watering hole operations in Drive-by Compromise, enabling Phishing operations, or facilitating Command and Control. Instead of compromising a third-party Server or renting a Virtual Private Server, adversaries may opt to configure and run their own servers in support of operations. Free trial periods of cloud servers may also be abused.[1][2]
Adversaries may only need a lightweight setup if most of their activities will take place using online infrastructure. Or, they may need to build extensive infrastructure if they want to test, communicate, and control other aspects of their activities on their own systems.[3]
Analyst context for executives and security teams
This technique covers adversaries obtaining physical servers to support operations before compromise. For leaders, the significance is that some attack infrastructure is prepared outside the victim environment, so internal endpoint controls alone may not provide early warning. The value is in understanding whether threat intelligence, external scanning context, phishing infrastructure monitoring, and incident response playbooks can connect suspicious servers to later activity such as phishing, drive-by compromise, or command and control.
Executive priority
Treat this as a pre-compromise resilience issue rather than a single alerting problem. Executives should ask whether the organization has a repeatable way to track adversary infrastructure indicators, preserve evidence during incidents, and use external intelligence to prioritize exposure reduction. This is especially relevant where business continuity depends on rapid phishing response, C2 containment, or protection of high-value operational environments, as ATT&CK links this behavior to campaigns and groups targeting sectors including energy, government, telecommunications, defense, aerospace, finance, healthcare, transportation, and critical infrastructure.
Technical view
T1583.004 is a Resource Development sub-technique under Acquire Infrastructure on the PRE platform. MITRE does not provide native detection text, so SOC and detection teams should validate coverage through the related detection strategy DET0871 and through local intelligence workflows. Practical validation should focus on whether externally hosted servers observed in campaigns can be correlated with phishing, drive-by, watering hole, or command-and-control activity, without assuming that server acquisition itself will be visible inside enterprise telemetry.
Likely telemetry
- Threat intelligence records for adversary-controlled or suspicious server infrastructure
- External scan data and internet-facing infrastructure observations
- DNS, domain, and hosting metadata associated with suspicious infrastructure
- Email security telemetry for links or payloads hosted on external servers
- Web proxy, firewall, and network connection logs showing contact with suspicious servers
Detection direction
- Confirm what DET0871-style detection or threat hunting means in the local environment, since MITRE provides no detection procedure for this object.
- Tune correlation between external infrastructure intelligence and internal telemetry such as email clicks, proxy events, DNS lookups, and outbound network sessions.
- Account for false positives: legitimate hosting providers, newly provisioned servers, and cloud trial infrastructure can resemble suspicious infrastructure without victim-specific context.
- Look for relationship-driven context: servers may support phishing, drive-by compromise, watering hole operations, or command and control, so detection is stronger when infrastructure indicators align with those behaviors.
- Identify blind spots where the organization lacks external scan visibility, enrichment on hosting infrastructure, or retention of DNS/proxy/firewall logs needed for retrospective analysis.
Mitigation priorities
- Apply pre-compromise mitigation priorities from M1056: reduce attack surface, limit information useful to adversary preparation where practical, and increase the difficulty of successful operations.
- Strengthen phishing and web access controls so adversary-hosted content is less likely to reach users or execute successfully.
- Maintain threat intelligence and incident response processes that can rapidly block, scope, and document suspicious server infrastructure when it appears in an investigation.
- Use exposure management and external attack surface review to understand how adversaries could tailor infrastructure toward public-facing services or high-value business processes.
- Preserve compliance evidence showing how suspicious infrastructure indicators are triaged, blocked, escalated, and reviewed.
Analyst notes and limits
The relationship set shows this technique used by multiple campaigns and groups, including Night Dragon, Operation Honeybee, Operation Wocao, Operation Dream Job, Sandworm Team, GALLIUM, Kimsuky, Earth Lusca, CURIUM, Mustard Tempest, and VOID MANTICORE. These relationships support the conclusion that adversary-owned servers are a common enabling resource across espionage, initial access, and destructive contexts, but they do not by themselves prove current targeting of any specific organization.
The ATT&CK object has no official detection text and describes a PRE-stage behavior that usually occurs outside defender-controlled systems. Detection and risk decisions therefore depend heavily on local telemetry, threat intelligence quality, external visibility, and the ability to connect infrastructure indicators to observed phishing, web, DNS, proxy, firewall, or command-and-control events.
Server
Adversaries may buy, lease, rent, or obtain physical servers that can be used during targeting. Use of servers allows an adversary to stage, launch, and execute an operation. During post-compromise activity, adversaries may utilize servers for various tasks, such as watering hole operations in Drive-by Compromise, enabling Phishing operations, or facilitating Command and Control. Instead of compromising a third-party Server or renting a Virtual Private Server, adversaries may opt to configure and run their own servers in support of operations. Free trial periods of cloud servers may also be abused.[1][2]
Adversaries may only need a lightweight setup if most of their activities will take place using online infrastructure. Or, they may need to build extensive infrastructure if they want to test, communicate, and control other aspects of their activities on their own systems.[3]
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.
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.
| Domain | ID | Name | Relationship / procedure |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enterprise | T1583 | Acquire Infrastructure | This object subtechnique of Acquire Infrastructure. |
Groups, software, and campaigns
G0093: GALLIUM
GALLIUM is a cyberespionage group that has been active since at least 2012, primarily targeting telecommunications companies, financial institutions, and government entities in Afghanistan, Australia, Belgium, Cambodia, Malaysia, Mozambique, the Philippines, Russia, and Vietnam. This group is particularly known for launching Operation Soft Cell, a long-term campaign targeting telecommunications providers.[1] Security researchers have identified GALLIUM as a likely Chinese state-sponsored group, based in part on tools used and TTPs commonly associated with Chinese threat actors.[1][2][3]
G0094: Kimsuky
Kimsuky is a Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK)-based cyber espionage group that has been active since at least 2012. The group initially targeted South Korean government agencies, think tanks, and subject-matter experts in various fields. Its operations expanded to include the United Nations and organizations in the government, education, business services, and manufacturing sectors across the United States, Japan, Russia, and Europe. Kimsuky has focused collection on foreign policy and national security issues tied to the Korean Peninsula, nuclear policy, and sanctions. Kimsuky operations have overlapped with those of other North Korean state-sponsored cyber espionage actors as a result of ad hoc collaborations or other limited resource sharing.[1][2][3][4][5][6]
Kimsuky was assessed to be responsible for the 2014 Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co. compromise; other notable campaigns include Operation STOLEN PENCIL (2018), Operation Kabar Cobra (2019), and Operation Smoke Screen (2019).[7][8][9] In 2023, Kimsuky was observed using commercial large language models (LLMs) to assist with vulnerability research, scripting, social engineering and reconnaissance.[10]
DPRK threat actor cluster boundaries overlap in open source reporting, with some security researchers consolidating all attributed North Korean state-sponsored cyber activity under Lazarus Group, rather than tracking operationally distinct subgroups.
G0034: Sandworm Team
Sandworm Team is a destructive threat group that has been attributed to Russia's General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) Main Center for Special Technologies (GTsST) military unit 74455.[1][2] This group has been active since at least 2009.[3][4][5][6]
In October 2020, the US indicted six GRU Unit 74455 officers associated with Sandworm Team for the following cyber operations: the 2015 and 2016 attacks against Ukrainian electrical companies and government organizations, the 2017 worldwide NotPetya attack, targeting of the 2017 French presidential campaign, the 2018 Olympic Destroyer attack against the Winter Olympic Games, the 2018 operation against the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, and attacks against the country of Georgia in 2018 and 2019.[1][2] Some of these were conducted with the assistance of GRU Unit 26165, which is also referred to as APT28.[7]
G1055: VOID MANTICORE
VOID MANTICORE is a threat group assessed to operate on behalf of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS).[1] Active since at least mid-2022, VOID MANTICORE has targeted government entities, critical infrastructure, and private sector organizations across Albania, Israel, and the United States.[1][2] VOID MANTICORE conducts destructive cyber operations, combining wiper attacks with hack-and-leak campaigns. The group has operated under multiple public-facing personas, including HomeLand Justice in operations against Albania, Karma and Karma Below in campaigns targeting Israeli organizations, and Handala Hack, its current primary persona, which has claimed activity against Israeli and U.S. entities, including a March 2026 attack against Stryker Corporation.[1][3] VOID MANTICORE has been observed collaborating with Scarred Manticore, which has been linked to initial access operations preceding VOID MANTICORE’s activity.[4]
G1006: Earth Lusca
Earth Lusca is a suspected China-based cyber espionage group that has been active since at least April 2019. Earth Lusca has targeted organizations in Australia, China, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Nepal, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, the United Arab Emirates, Nigeria, Germany, France, and the United States. Targets included government institutions, news media outlets, gambling companies, educational institutions, COVID-19 research organizations, telecommunications companies, religious movements banned in China, and cryptocurrency trading platforms; security researchers assess some Earth Lusca operations may be financially motivated.[1]
Earth Lusca has used malware commonly used by other Chinese threat groups, including APT41 and the Winnti Group cluster, however security researchers assess Earth Lusca's techniques and infrastructure are separate.[1]
G1020: Mustard Tempest
Mustard Tempest is an initial access broker that has operated the SocGholish distribution network since at least 2017. Mustard Tempest has partnered with Indrik Spider to provide access for the download of additional malware including LockBit, WastedLocker, and remote access tools.[1][2][3][4]
G1012: CURIUM
CURIUM is an Iranian threat group, first reported in September 2019 and active since at least July 2018, targeting IT service providers in the Middle East.[1] CURIUM has since invested in building relationships with potential targets via social media over a period of months to establish trust and confidence before sending malware. Security researchers note CURIUM has demonstrated great patience and persistence by chatting with potential targets daily and sending benign files to help lower their security consciousness.[2]
C0022: Operation Dream Job
Operation Dream Job was a cyber espionage operation likely conducted by Lazarus Group that targeted the defense, aerospace, government, and other sectors in the United States, Israel, Australia, Russia, and India. In at least one case, the cyber actors tried to monetize their network access to conduct a business email compromise (BEC) operation. In 2020, security researchers noted overlapping TTPs, to include fake job lures and code similarities, between Operation Dream Job, Operation North Star, and Operation Interception; by 2022 security researchers described Operation Dream Job as an umbrella term covering both Operation Interception and Operation North Star.[1][2][3][4]
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]
C0002: Night Dragon
Night Dragon was a cyber espionage campaign that targeted oil, energy, and petrochemical companies, along with individuals and executives in Kazakhstan, Taiwan, Greece, and the United States. The unidentified threat actors searched for information related to oil and gas field production systems, financials, and collected data from SCADA systems. Based on the observed techniques, tools, and network activities, security researchers assessed the campaign involved a threat group based in China.[1]
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]
All related ATT&CK context
Mitigation direction
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 | 1.3 | Current bundle | 59456d4ec148… |
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]
Free Trial PurpleUrchin
Gamazo, William. Quist, Nathaniel.. (2023, January 5). PurpleUrchin Bypasses CAPTCHA and Steals Cloud Platform Resources. Retrieved February 28, 2024.
Open source URL -
[2]
Freejacked
Clark, Michael. (2023, August 14). Google’s Vertex AI Platform Gets Freejacked. Retrieved February 28, 2024.
Open source URL -
[3]
NYTStuxnet
William J. Broad, John Markoff, and David E. Sanger. (2011, January 15). Israeli Test on Worm Called Crucial in Iran Nuclear Delay. Retrieved March 1, 2017.
Open source URL -
[4]
Koczwara Beacon Hunting Sep 2021
Koczwara, M. (2021, September 7). Hunting Cobalt Strike C2 with Shodan. Retrieved October 12, 2021.
Open source URL -
[5]
Mandiant SCANdalous Jul 2020
Stephens, A. (2020, July 13). SCANdalous! (External Detection Using Network Scan Data and Automation). Retrieved November 17, 2024.
Open source URL -
[6]
ThreatConnect Infrastructure Dec 2020
ThreatConnect. (2020, December 15). Infrastructure Research and Hunting: Boiling the Domain Ocean. Retrieved October 12, 2021.
Open source URL -
[7]
mitre-attack T1583.004Open source URL
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