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MITRE ATT&CK® Tactic

TA0102: Discovery

The adversary is locating information to assess and identify their targets in your environment.

Discovery consists of techniques that adversaries use to survey your ICS environment and gain knowledge about the internal network, control system devices, and how their processes interact. These techniques help adversaries observe the environment and determine next steps for target selection and Lateral Movement. They also allow adversaries to explore what they can control and gain insight on interactions between various control system processes. Discovery techniques are often an act of progression into the environment which enable the adversary to orient themselves before deciding how to act. Adversaries may use Discovery techniques that result in Collection, to help determine how available resources benefit their current objective. A combination of native device communications and functions, and custom tools are often used toward this post-compromise information-gathering objective.

ICSTA0102TacticObject v1.0Modified
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis

Security context for executives and security teams

Automation confidenceMedium

TA0102: Discovery describes The adversary is locating information to assess and identify their targets in your environment. Discovery consists of techniques that adversaries use to survey your ICS environment and gain knowledge about the internal network, control system devices, and how their processes interact. These techniques help adversaries observe the environment and determine next steps for target selection and Lateral Movement. They also allow adversaries to explore what they can control and gain insight on interactions between variou...

Executive priority

TA0102: Discovery is an official MITRE ATT&CK tactic. Glexia treats it as defensive behavior context for prioritizing monitoring, control validation, and response planning without using the object by itself as an attribution claim.

Technical view

Security teams should validate TA0102: Discovery by reviewing the official ATT&CK relationships, mapped tactics (the mapped ATT&CK tactic context), supported platforms (the platforms named in the official object), and available local telemetry before making detection or mitigation decisions.

Likely telemetry

  • Official ATT&CK relationships and object metadata

Detection direction

  • Validate whether TA0102: Discovery appears in your detection coverage and tabletop scenarios.
  • Use the object to align executive risk language with SOC, incident response, and detection engineering work.
  • Do not treat ATT&CK relationship context as attribution without corroborating evidence.

Mitigation priorities

  • Map the object to existing controls and identify missing telemetry or response ownership.
  • Prioritize mitigations that reduce exposure on the listed platforms and tactics.
  • Review adjacent ATT&CK relationships before changing policy, detections, or reporting language.
Additional notes and limits

Baseline Glexia take generated from the official MITRE ATT&CK STIX object, source hash, tactics, platforms, and detection fields. It is safe to replace with a richer model-generated take for the same source hash later.

This baseline take is source-grounded and schema-validated, but it does not include environment-specific telemetry, incident evidence, or threat-intelligence corroboration.

Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.

Official MITRE ATT&CK definition

Discovery

The adversary is locating information to assess and identify their targets in your environment.

Discovery consists of techniques that adversaries use to survey your ICS environment and gain knowledge about the internal network, control system devices, and how their processes interact. These techniques help adversaries observe the environment and determine next steps for target selection and Lateral Movement. They also allow adversaries to explore what they can control and gain insight on interactions between various control system processes. Discovery techniques are often an act of progression into the environment which enable the adversary to orient themselves before deciding how to act. Adversaries may use Discovery techniques that result in Collection, to help determine how available resources benefit their current objective. A combination of native device communications and functions, and custom tools are often used toward this post-compromise information-gathering objective.

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.

Relationship explorer

All related ATT&CK context

No relationships are available in the current normalized data for this object.

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
19.2
Object version
1.0
Created
Modified
Raw hash
39f11cc48e32ff69...
Imported snapshots across ATT&CK releases(2)
ReleaseBundle importedObject versionModifiedStatusRaw hash
19.21.0Current bundle39f11cc48e32…
19.11.0Older bundle39f11cc48e32…
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]
    mitre-attackTA0102
    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.