T1585.001: Social Media Accounts
Adversaries may create and cultivate social media accounts that can be used during targeting. Adversaries can create social media accounts that can be used to build a persona to further operations. Persona development consists of the development of public information, presence, history and appropriate affiliations.[1][2]
For operations incorporating social engineering, the utilization of a persona on social media may be important. These personas may be fictitious or impersonate real people. The persona may exist on a single social media site or across multiple sites (ex: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.). Establishing a persona on social media may require development of additional documentation to make them seem real. This could include filling out profile information, developing social networks, or incorporating photos.
Once a persona has been developed an adversary can use it to create connections to targets of interest. These connections may be direct or may include trying to connect through others.[1][2] These accounts may be leveraged during other phases of the adversary lifecycle, such as during Initial Access (ex: Spearphishing via Service).
Analyst context for executives and security teams
Social Media Accounts (T1585.001) is a pre-compromise resource-development behavior: adversaries create or cultivate social media personas before direct intrusion activity begins. The business risk is that trust-building can happen outside owned infrastructure, making later phishing, recruiting-themed lures, impersonation, or relationship-based targeting look credible before SOC tools see a traditional security event.
Executive priority
Leaders should treat this as an exposure-management and readiness issue, not only a phishing issue. Ask whether high-risk staff, executives, recruiters, researchers, finance users, administrators, and public-facing teams know how to report suspicious social media contact; whether the organization can identify impersonation or fake affiliation early; and whether incident response has a path for preserving evidence and escalating platform abuse. The relationship context shows this behavior is used across multiple ATT&CK-tracked groups and campaigns, including espionage and financially motivated activity, so it can matter to business continuity, credential risk, and reputational protection even before malware appears.
Technical view
This technique is mapped to PRE and the Resource Development tactic, so coverage will usually depend on external visibility, user reporting, threat intelligence, and workflows between SOC, communications, legal, HR, recruiting, and executive protection functions. MITRE provides no official detection text for this object, but a related detection strategy, DET0851 Detection of Social Media Accounts, is listed. SOC and IR teams should validate how suspicious personas, fake profiles, unsolicited connection requests, and social-media-originated lures are captured, triaged, and correlated with later activity such as Spearphishing via Service (T1566.003), which MITRE notes as a possible later use.
Likely telemetry
- Employee-reported suspicious social media connection requests, direct messages, recruiter outreach, or impersonation attempts
- Brand, executive, and employee impersonation monitoring from public social media and open-source sources
- Records from HR, recruiting, communications, legal, or executive protection teams about fake profiles or unauthorized affiliations
- Threat intelligence or OSINT reporting on personas targeting the organization or sector
- Phishing reports, email security events, or collaboration/SaaS logs when social media contact transitions into links, files, or service-based messages
Detection direction
- Validate whether DET0851-style coverage exists in practice, since the ATT&CK object does not include official detection guidance.
- Tune intake so user reports mentioning social media personas are not handled as isolated nuisance events; correlate them with phishing, credential prompts, suspicious links, or repeated targeting of the same roles.
- Prioritize monitoring and reporting paths for roles likely to receive trust-based outreach, such as executives, administrators, recruiters, finance, researchers, government-facing staff, and public spokespeople, based on local risk.
- Account for false positives: legitimate recruiters, journalists, partners, and customers may contact staff through social media. Triage should focus on impersonation, inconsistent persona history, suspicious affiliation claims, unusual urgency, requests to move channels, links/files, or targeting patterns.
- Track clusters of similar personas across platforms when available, because MITRE notes personas may exist on a single site or across multiple sites and may include profile details, networks, and photos to appear legitimate.
Mitigation priorities
- Apply M1056 Pre-compromise principles: reduce unnecessary public exposure that helps adversaries build convincing personas and identify targets.
- Maintain clear public guidance on official corporate accounts, recruiters, executives, and approved hiring or business-contact processes where applicable.
- Create a simple reporting path for suspicious social media outreach and impersonation, with evidence preservation instructions for employees.
- Provide role-based awareness for staff most likely to be targeted by relationship-building or recruiting-themed approaches, without relying on awareness as the only control.
- Define escalation procedures for confirmed impersonation or suspicious personas, including SOC/IR review and coordination with communications, legal, HR, and relevant platform abuse processes.
Analyst notes and limits
The most important defensive decision is ownership: this behavior often starts outside enterprise-controlled systems, so coverage depends on whether external monitoring, employee reporting, and SOC correlation are operationalized. ATT&CK relationships show use by multiple groups and campaigns, including Operation Dream Job, Operation Ghost, Lazarus Group, Kimsuky, Scattered Spider, Star Blizzard, Moonstone Sleet, and others, but those relationships should inform prioritization rather than imply current targeting of any specific organization.
Official MITRE detection text is not provided, and the platform is PRE, so there may be little or no native endpoint/network telemetry at the resource-development stage. Any assessment of exposure, detection coverage, or active targeting requires local evidence, social media visibility, user reports, and downstream security telemetry.
Social Media Accounts
Adversaries may create and cultivate social media accounts that can be used during targeting. Adversaries can create social media accounts that can be used to build a persona to further operations. Persona development consists of the development of public information, presence, history and appropriate affiliations.[1][2]
For operations incorporating social engineering, the utilization of a persona on social media may be important. These personas may be fictitious or impersonate real people. The persona may exist on a single social media site or across multiple sites (ex: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.). Establishing a persona on social media may require development of additional documentation to make them seem real. This could include filling out profile information, developing social networks, or incorporating photos.
Once a persona has been developed an adversary can use it to create connections to targets of interest. These connections may be direct or may include trying to connect through others.[1][2] These accounts may be leveraged during other phases of the adversary lifecycle, such as during Initial Access (ex: Spearphishing via Service).
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 | T1585 | Establish Accounts | This object subtechnique of Establish Accounts. |
Groups, software, and campaigns
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]
G1015: Scattered Spider
Scattered Spider is a native English-speaking cybercriminal group active since at least 2022. [1] [2] The group initially targeted customer relationship management (CRM) providers, business process outsourcing (BPO) firms, and telecommunications and technology companies before expanding in 2023 to gaming, hospitality, retail, managed service provider (MSP), manufacturing, and financial sectors. [2] Scattered Spider relies heavily on social engineering, including impersonating IT and help-desk staff, to gain initial access, bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA), and compromise enterprise networks. The group has adapted its tooling to evade endpoint detection and response (EDR) defenses and used ransomware for financial gain. [3] [4] [5] Scattered Spider had expanded into hybrid cloud and identity environments, using help-desk impersonation and MFA bypass to obtain administrator access in Okta, AWS, and Office 365. [6]
G1051: Medusa Group
Medusa Group has been active since at least 2021 and was initially operated as a closed ransomware group before evolving into a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) operation. Some reporting indicates that certain attacks may still be conducted directly by the ransomware’s core developers. Public sources have also referred to the group as “Spearwing” or “Medusa Actors.” [1] [2] Medusa Group employs living-off-the-land techniques, frequently leveraging publicly available tools and common remote management software to conduct operations. The group engages in double extortion tactics, exfiltrating data prior to encryption and threatening to publish stolen information if ransom demands are not met. [3] For initial access, Medusa Group has exploited publicly known vulnerabilities, conducted phishing campaigns, and used credentials or access purchased from Initial Access Brokers (IABs). The group is opportunistic and has targeted a wide range of sectors globally. [4]
G1011: EXOTIC LILY
EXOTIC LILY is a financially motivated group that has been closely linked with Wizard Spider and the deployment of ransomware including Conti and Diavol. EXOTIC LILY may be acting as an initial access broker for other malicious actors, and has targeted a wide range of industries including IT, cybersecurity, and healthcare since at least September 2021.[1]
G1001: HEXANE
HEXANE is a cyber espionage threat group that has targeted oil & gas, telecommunications, aviation, and internet service provider organizations since at least 2017. Targeted companies have been located in the Middle East and Africa, including Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Morocco, and Tunisia. HEXANE's TTPs appear similar to APT33 and OilRig but due to differences in victims and tools it is tracked as a separate entity.[1][2][3][4]
G1050: Water Galura
Water Galura are the operators of the Qilin Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) who handle payload generation, ransom negotiations, and the publication of stolen data for Qilin affilates recruited on Russian cybercrime forums. Water Galura have been active since at least 2022 and use a double extortion model where they demand payment for providing decryption keys and for refraining from publishing the stolen data to their leak site.[1][2]
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.
G0065: Leviathan
Leviathan is a Chinese state-sponsored cyber espionage group that has been attributed to the Ministry of State Security's (MSS) Hainan State Security Department and an affiliated front company.[1] Active since at least 2009, Leviathan has targeted the following sectors: academia, aerospace/aviation, biomedical, defense industrial base, government, healthcare, manufacturing, maritime, and transportation across the US, Canada, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.[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]
G0003: Cleaver
G0032: Lazarus Group
Lazarus Group is a North Korean state-sponsored cyber threat group attributed to the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB). [1] [2] Lazarus Group has been active since at least 2009 and is reportedly responsible for the November 2014 destructive wiper attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, identified by Novetta as part of Operation Blockbuster. Malware used by Lazarus Group correlates to other reported campaigns, including Operation Flame, Operation 1Mission, Operation Troy, DarkSeoul, and Ten Days of Rain.[3]
North Korea’s cyber operations have shown a consistent pattern of adaptation, forming and reorganizing units as national priorities shift. These units frequently share personnel, infrastructure, malware, and tradecraft, making it difficult to attribute specific operations with high confidence. Public reporting often uses “Lazarus Group” as an umbrella term for multiple North Korean cyber operators conducting espionage, destructive attacks, and financially motivated campaigns.[4][5][6]
G0050: APT32
APT32 is a suspected Vietnam-based threat group that has been active since at least 2014. The group has targeted multiple private sector industries as well as foreign governments, dissidents, and journalists with a strong focus on Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam, the Philippines, Laos, and Cambodia. They have extensively used strategic web compromises to compromise victims.[1][2][3]
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]
C0023: Operation Ghost
Operation Ghost was an APT29 campaign starting in 2013 that included operations against ministries of foreign affairs in Europe and the Washington, D.C. embassy of a European Union country. During Operation Ghost, APT29 used new families of malware and leveraged web services, steganography, and unique C2 infrastructure for each victim.[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 | 1.1 | Current bundle | c399f23d5d11… |
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]
NEWSCASTER2014
Lennon, M. (2014, May 29). Iranian Hackers Targeted US Officials in Elaborate Social Media Attack Operation. Retrieved March 1, 2017.
Open source URL -
[2]
BlackHatRobinSage
Ryan, T. (2010). “Getting In Bed with Robin Sage.”. Retrieved March 6, 2017.
Open source URL -
[3]
mitre-attack T1585.001Open source URL
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