T0817: Drive-by Compromise
Adversaries may gain access to a system during a drive-by compromise, when a user visits a website as part of a regular browsing session. With this technique, the user's web browser is targeted and exploited simply by visiting the compromised website.
The adversary may target a specific community, such as trusted third party suppliers or other industry specific groups, which often visit the target website. This kind of targeted attack relies on a common interest, and is known as a strategic web compromise or watering hole attack.
The National Cyber Awareness System (NCAS) has issued a Technical Alert (TA) regarding Russian government cyber activity targeting critical infrastructure sectors. CitationCybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency March 2018 Analysis by DHS and FBI has noted two distinct categories of victims in the Dragonfly campaign on the Western energy sector: staging and intended targets. The adversary targeted the less secure networks of staging targets, including trusted third-party suppliers and related peripheral organizations. Initial access to the intended targets used watering hole attacks to target process control, ICS, and critical infrastructure related trade publications and informational websites.
Security context for executives and security teams
T0817: Drive-by Compromise describes Adversaries may gain access to a system during a drive-by compromise, when a user visits a website as part of a regular browsing session. With this technique, the user's web browser is targeted and exploited simply by visiting the compromised website. The adversary may target a specific community, such as trusted third party suppliers or other industry specific groups, which often visit the target website. This kind of targeted attack relies on a common interest, and is known as a strategic web compromise or wateri...
Executive priority
T0817: Drive-by Compromise is an official MITRE ATT&CK technique. 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 T0817: Drive-by Compromise by reviewing the official ATT&CK relationships, mapped tactics (initial-access), supported platforms (None), and available local telemetry before making detection or mitigation decisions.
Likely telemetry
- Official ATT&CK relationships and object metadata
Detection direction
- Validate whether T0817: Drive-by Compromise 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.
Drive-by Compromise
Adversaries may gain access to a system during a drive-by compromise, when a user visits a website as part of a regular browsing session. With this technique, the user's web browser is targeted and exploited simply by visiting the compromised website.
The adversary may target a specific community, such as trusted third party suppliers or other industry specific groups, which often visit the target website. This kind of targeted attack relies on a common interest, and is known as a strategic web compromise or watering hole attack.
The National Cyber Awareness System (NCAS) has issued a Technical Alert (TA) regarding Russian government cyber activity targeting critical infrastructure sectors. CitationCybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency March 2018 Analysis by DHS and FBI has noted two distinct categories of victims in the Dragonfly campaign on the Western energy sector: staging and intended targets. The adversary targeted the less secure networks of staging targets, including trusted third-party suppliers and related peripheral organizations. Initial access to the intended targets used watering hole attacks to target process control, ICS, and critical infrastructure related trade publications and informational websites.
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.
Groups, software, and campaigns
G1000: ALLANITE
ALLANITE is a suspected Russian cyber espionage group, that has primarily targeted the electric utility sector within the United States and United Kingdom. The group's tactics and techniques are reportedly similar to Dragonfly, although ALLANITEs technical capabilities have not exhibited disruptive or destructive abilities. It has been suggested that the group maintains a presence in ICS for the purpose of gaining understanding of processes and to maintain persistence. [1]
G0035: Dragonfly
Dragonfly is a cyber espionage group that has been attributed to Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) Center 16.[1][2] Active since at least 2010, Dragonfly has targeted defense and aviation companies, government entities, companies related to industrial control systems, and critical infrastructure sectors worldwide through supply chain, spearphishing, and drive-by compromise attacks.[3][4][5][6][7][8][9]
G0049: OilRig
OilRig is a suspected Iranian threat group that has targeted Middle Eastern and international victims since at least 2014. The group has targeted a variety of sectors, including financial, government, energy, chemical, and telecommunications. It appears the group carries out supply chain attacks, leveraging the trust relationship between organizations to attack their primary targets. The group works on behalf of the Iranian government based on infrastructure details that contain references to Iran, use of Iranian infrastructure, and targeting that aligns with nation-state interests.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7]
G0088: TEMP.Veles
TEMP.Veles is a Russia-based threat group that has targeted critical infrastructure. The group has been observed utilizing TRITON, a malware framework designed to manipulate industrial safety systems.[1][2][3]
S0606: Bad Rabbit
Bad Rabbit is a self-propagating ransomware that affected the Ukrainian transportation sector in 2017. Bad Rabbit has also targeted organizations and consumers in Russia. [1][2][3]
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(2)
| Release | Bundle imported | Object version | Modified | Status | Raw hash |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 19.2 | 1.0 | Current bundle | 1ce76ae87656… | ||
| 19.1 | 1.0 | Older bundle | 1ce76ae87656… |
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.
- [1]Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency March 2018
Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency 2018, March 15 Alert (TA18-074A) Russian Government Cyber Activity Targeting Energy and Other Critical Infrastructure Sectors Retrieved. 2019/10/11
Open source URL - [2]mitre-attackT0817Open source URL
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