T1589: Gather Victim Identity Information
Adversaries may gather information about the victim's identity that can be used during targeting. Information about identities may include a variety of details, including personal data (ex: employee names, email addresses, security question responses, etc.) as well as sensitive details such as credentials or multi-factor authentication (MFA) configurations.
Adversaries may gather this information in various ways, such as direct elicitation via Phishing for Information. Information about users could also be enumerated via other active means (i.e. Active Scanning) such as probing and analyzing responses from authentication services that may reveal valid usernames in a system or permitted MFA /methods associated with those usernames.[1][2] Information about victims may also be exposed to adversaries via online or other accessible data sets (ex: Social Media or Search Victim-Owned Websites).[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]
Gathering this information may reveal opportunities for other forms of reconnaissance (ex: Search Open Websites/Domains or Phishing for Information), establishing operational resources (ex: Compromise Accounts), and/or initial access (ex: Phishing or Valid Accounts).
Analyst context for executives and security teams
This technique matters because attackers often prepare intrusions before touching your environment by collecting employee names, email addresses, credentials, MFA details, and security-question data. That information can make later phishing, valid-account use, account compromise, and other reconnaissance more credible and harder for the SOC to recognize as hostile.
Executive priority
Treat this as a pre-compromise risk indicator: identity exposure can convert public information, leaked credentials, or authentication behavior into business-impacting access attempts. Leaders should ask whether the organization can prove what identity data is externally exposed, whether authentication services leak useful signals, and whether leaked or reused credentials are handled quickly enough to reduce phishing and valid-account risk.
Technical view
ATT&CK places T1589 in Reconnaissance on the PRE platform, with sub-techniques for credentials, email addresses, and employee names. Because the official detection field is not provided, SOC and detection teams should validate coverage around the evidence paths MITRE describes: username enumeration against authentication services, MFA or self-service password reset discovery, phishing-for-information reporting, exposed identities on public websites and social media, and credentials or tokens exposed in public datasets or repositories. Relationship context also links this behavior to multiple campaigns and groups, so threat intel teams should use it as early-stage context rather than as standalone attribution.
Likely telemetry
- Authentication service logs showing failed, invalid-user, or enumeration-like activity
- SSO, MFA, and self-service password reset audit logs where available
- Email security and user-reported phishing-for-information events
- External attack surface findings for public employee names, email formats, and exposed identity details
- Credential exposure monitoring for corporate email addresses, passwords, tokens, or secrets
Detection direction
- Do not rely on endpoint telemetry alone; this is PRE-stage reconnaissance and may occur outside owned infrastructure.
- Validate whether authentication and password-reset services reveal different responses for valid versus invalid users or disclose permitted MFA methods.
- Tune for patterns of username probing while accounting for legitimate failed logins, help-desk activity, onboarding, and user mistakes.
- Correlate exposed employee names and email addresses with phishing-for-information reports and later valid-account attempts.
- Track the sub-techniques separately: credentials, email addresses, and employee names drive different collection and response workflows.
Mitigation priorities
- Prioritize pre-compromise exposure reduction consistent with M1056: limit unnecessary public identity information and reduce attack surface useful to reconnaissance.
- Review authentication, MFA, and self-service password reset flows for information leakage about valid users or allowed methods.
- Run recurring external exposure checks for corporate credentials, email addresses, employee names, and secrets in public datasets or repositories.
- Strengthen identity controls that reduce the value of gathered information, including resilient MFA processes and rapid credential reset workflows when exposure is confirmed.
- Prepare IR playbooks for leaked credential or identity-exposure events so teams can move from discovery to containment without debating ownership.
Analyst notes and limits
The relationship set shows this technique used by several campaigns and groups, including espionage and financially motivated activity, but those relationships should not be treated as proof of attribution in a local incident. The main decision value is readiness: knowing whether identity data exposure is measured, whether authentication services leak signals, and whether SOC/IR teams can connect reconnaissance to later phishing or valid-account behavior.
MITRE provides no official detection text for this object, and PRE-stage activity often happens on third-party, public, or attacker-controlled infrastructure. Local validation is required to determine which identity exposures are observable, which logs are retained, and whether authentication telemetry is detailed enough to distinguish probing from normal user error.
Gather Victim Identity Information
Adversaries may gather information about the victim's identity that can be used during targeting. Information about identities may include a variety of details, including personal data (ex: employee names, email addresses, security question responses, etc.) as well as sensitive details such as credentials or multi-factor authentication (MFA) configurations.
Adversaries may gather this information in various ways, such as direct elicitation via Phishing for Information. Information about users could also be enumerated via other active means (i.e. Active Scanning) such as probing and analyzing responses from authentication services that may reveal valid usernames in a system or permitted MFA /methods associated with those usernames.[1][2] Information about victims may also be exposed to adversaries via online or other accessible data sets (ex: Social Media or Search Victim-Owned Websites).[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]
Gathering this information may reveal opportunities for other forms of reconnaissance (ex: Search Open Websites/Domains or Phishing for Information), establishing operational resources (ex: Compromise Accounts), and/or initial access (ex: Phishing or Valid Accounts).
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 | T1589.003 | Employee Names Sub-technique | Employee Names subtechnique of this object. |
| Enterprise | T1589.002 | Email Addresses Sub-technique | Email Addresses subtechnique of this object. |
| Enterprise | T1589.001 | Credentials Sub-technique | Credentials subtechnique of this object. |
Groups, software, and campaigns
G1004: LAPSUS$
LAPSUS$ is cyber criminal threat group that has been active since at least mid-2021. LAPSUS$ specializes in large-scale social engineering and extortion operations, including destructive attacks without the use of ransomware. The group has targeted organizations globally, including in the government, manufacturing, higher education, energy, healthcare, technology, telecommunications, and media sectors.[1][2][3]
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]
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]
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]
G1016: FIN13
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]
G1033: Star Blizzard
Star Blizzard is a cyber espionage and influence group originating in Russia that has been active since at least 2019. Star Blizzard campaigns align closely with Russian state interests and have included persistent phishing and credential theft against academic, defense, government, NGO, and think tank organizations in NATO countries, particularly the US and the UK.[1][2][3][4]
G1052: Contagious Interview
Contagious Interview is a North Korea–aligned threat group active since 2023. The group conducts both cyberespionage and financially motivated operations, including the theft of cryptocurrency and user credentials. Contagious Interview targets Windows, Linux, and macOS systems, with a particular focus on individuals engaged in software development and cryptocurrency-related activities. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]
G0059: Magic Hound
Magic Hound is an Iranian-sponsored threat group that conducts long term, resource-intensive cyber espionage operations, likely on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. They have targeted European, U.S., and Middle Eastern government and military personnel, academics, journalists, and organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), via complex social engineering campaigns since at least 2014.[1][2][3][4][5]
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]
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]
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 | 04fd879e7024… |
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]
GrimBlog UsernameEnum
GrimHacker. (2017, July 24). Office365 ActiveSync Username Enumeration. Retrieved December 9, 2021.
Open source URL -
[2]
Obsidian SSPR Abuse 2023
Noah Corradin and Shuyang Wang. (2023, August 1). Behind The Breach: Self-Service Password Reset (SSPR) Abuse in Azure AD. Retrieved March 28, 2024.
Open source URL -
[3]
OPM Leak
Cybersecurity Resource Center. (n.d.). CYBERSECURITY INCIDENTS. Retrieved September 16, 2024.
Open source URL -
[4]
Register Deloitte
Thomson, I. (2017, September 26). Deloitte is a sitting duck: Key systems with RDP open, VPN and proxy 'login details leaked'. Retrieved October 19, 2020.
Open source URL -
[5]
Register Uber
McCarthy, K. (2015, February 28). FORK ME! Uber hauls GitHub into court to find who hacked database of 50,000 drivers. Retrieved October 19, 2020.
Open source URL -
[6]
Detectify Slack Tokens
Detectify. (2016, April 28). Slack bot token leakage exposing business critical information. Retrieved November 17, 2024.
Open source URL -
[7]
Forbes GitHub Creds
Sandvik, R. (2014, January 14). Attackers Scrape GitHub For Cloud Service Credentials, Hijack Account To Mine Virtual Currency. Retrieved October 19, 2020.
Open source URL -
[8]
GitHub truffleHog
Dylan Ayrey. (2016, December 31). truffleHog. Retrieved October 19, 2020.
Open source URL -
[9]
GitHub Gitrob
Michael Henriksen. (2018, June 9). Gitrob: Putting the Open Source in OSINT. Retrieved October 19, 2020.
Open source URL -
[10]
CNET Leaks
Ng, A. (2019, January 17). Massive breach leaks 773 million email addresses, 21 million passwords. Retrieved October 20, 2020.
Open source URL -
[11]
mitre-attack T1589Open source URL
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