LiveActive security incident?Get immediate response
MITRE ATT&CK® Technique

T1591.002: Business Relationships

Adversaries may gather information about the victim's business relationships that can be used during targeting. Information about an organization’s business relationships may include a variety of details, including second or third-party organizations/domains (ex: managed service providers, contractors, etc.) that have connected (and potentially elevated) network access. This information may also reveal supply chains and shipment paths for the victim’s hardware and software resources.

Adversaries may gather this information in various ways, such as direct elicitation via Phishing for Information. Information about business relationships may also be exposed to adversaries via online or other accessible data sets (ex: Social Media or Search Victim-Owned Websites).[1] Gathering this information may reveal opportunities for other forms of reconnaissance (ex: Phishing for Information or Search Open Websites/Domains), establishing operational resources (ex: Establish Accounts or Compromise Accounts), and/or initial access (ex: Supply Chain Compromise, Drive-by Compromise, or Trusted Relationship).

EnterpriseT1591.002Sub-techniqueObject v1.0Modified
Discuss defensive coverageBack to ATT&CK
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis

Security context for executives and security teams

Automation confidenceMedium

T1591.002: Business Relationships describes Adversaries may gather information about the victim's business relationships that can be used during targeting. Information about an organization’s business relationships may include a variety of details, including second or third-party organizations/domains (ex: managed service providers, contractors, etc.) that have connected (and potentially elevated) network access. This information may also reveal supply chains and shipment paths for the victim’s hardware and software resources. Adversaries may gather this inf...

Executive priority

T1591.002: Business Relationships 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 T1591.002: Business Relationships by reviewing the official ATT&CK relationships, mapped tactics (reconnaissance), supported platforms (PRE), and available local telemetry before making detection or mitigation decisions.

Likely telemetry

  • Official ATT&CK relationships and object metadata

Detection direction

  • Validate whether T1591.002: Business Relationships 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

Business Relationships

Adversaries may gather information about the victim's business relationships that can be used during targeting. Information about an organization’s business relationships may include a variety of details, including second or third-party organizations/domains (ex: managed service providers, contractors, etc.) that have connected (and potentially elevated) network access. This information may also reveal supply chains and shipment paths for the victim’s hardware and software resources.

Adversaries may gather this information in various ways, such as direct elicitation via Phishing for Information. Information about business relationships may also be exposed to adversaries via online or other accessible data sets (ex: Social Media or Search Victim-Owned Websites).[1] Gathering this information may reveal opportunities for other forms of reconnaissance (ex: Phishing for Information or Search Open Websites/Domains), establishing operational resources (ex: Establish Accounts or Compromise Accounts), and/or initial access (ex: Supply Chain Compromise, Drive-by Compromise, or Trusted Relationship).

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.

ATT&CK relationship table

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.

1 rows
DomainIDNameRelationship / procedure
EnterpriseT1591Gather Victim Org InformationThis object subtechnique of Gather Victim Org Information.
Associated objects

Groups, software, and campaigns

GroupEnterprise

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]

GroupEnterprise

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]

GroupEnterprise

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]

Relationship explorer

All related ATT&CK context

mitigates · MitigationM1056: Pre-compromiseEnterpriseuses · GroupG0035: DragonflyEnterpriseuses · GroupG0034: Sandworm TeamEnterpriseuses · GroupG1004: LAPSUS$Enterprisesubtechnique of · TechniqueT1591: Gather Victim Org InformationEnterprisedetects · Detection StrategyDET0855: Detection of Business RelationshipsEnterprise
Mitigations

Mitigation direction

MitigationEnterprise

M1056: Pre-compromise

Pre-compromise mitigations involve proactive measures and defenses implemented to prevent adversaries from successfully identifying and exploiting weaknesses during the Reconnaissance and Resource Development phases of an attack. These activities focus on reducing an organization's attack surface, identify adversarial preparation efforts, and increase the difficulty for attackers to conduct successful operations. This mitigation can be implemented through the following measures:

Limit Information Exposure:

- Regularly audit and sanitize publicly available data, including job posts, websites, and social media. - Use tools like OSINT monitoring platforms (e.g., SpiderFoot, Recon-ng) to identify leaked information.

Protect Domain and DNS Infrastructure:

- Enable DNSSEC and use WHOIS privacy protection. - Monitor for domain hijacking or lookalike domains using services like RiskIQ or DomainTools.

External Monitoring:

- Use tools like Shodan, Censys to monitor your external attack surface. - Deploy external vulnerability scanners to proactively address weaknesses.

Threat Intelligence:

- Leverage platforms like MISP, Recorded Future, or Anomali to track adversarial infrastructure, tools, and activity.

Content and Email Protections:

- Use email security solutions like Proofpoint, Microsoft Defender for Office 365, or Mimecast. - Enforce SPF/DKIM/DMARC policies to protect against email spoofing.

Training and Awareness:

- Educate employees on identifying phishing attempts, securing their social media, and avoiding information leaks.

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
c7adb89004345d4c...
Imported snapshots across ATT&CK releases(2)
ReleaseBundle importedObject versionModifiedStatusRaw hash
19.21.0Current bundlec7adb8900434…
19.11.0Older bundlec7adb8900434…
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.

Open mirrored raw JSONOpen MITRE-hosted copy
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]
    ThreatPost Broadvoice Leak

    Seals, T. (2020, October 15). Broadvoice Leak Exposes 350M Records, Personal Voicemail Transcripts. Retrieved October 20, 2020.

    Open source URL
  2. [2]
    mitre-attackT1591.002
    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.

Official MITRE ATT&CK siteOfficial STIX data repositoryMITRE ATT&CK terms of use