T1596: Search Open Technical Databases
MITRE ATT&CK T1596: Search Open Technical Databases Technique details for PRE, with detection guidance, relationships and mapped CVEs.
Security context for executives and security teams
T1596: Search Open Technical Databases describes Adversaries may search freely available technical databases for information about victims that can be used during targeting. Information about victims may be available in online databases and repositories, such as registrations of domains/certificates as well as public collections of network data/artifacts gathered from traffic and/or scans.(Citation: WHOIS)(Citation: DNS Dumpster)(Citation: Circl Passive DNS)(Citation: Medium SSL Cert)(Citation: SSLShopper Lookup)(Citation: DigitalShadows CDN)(Citation: Shodan) Ad...
Executive priority
T1596: Search Open Technical Databases 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 T1596: Search Open Technical Databases 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 T1596: Search Open Technical Databases 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.
Search Open Technical Databases
No official description is available in the imported ATT&CK source object.
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 | T1596.003 | Digital CertificatesSub-technique | Digital Certificates subtechnique of this object. |
| Enterprise | T1596.002 | WHOISSub-technique | WHOIS subtechnique of this object. |
| Enterprise | T1596.001 | DNS/Passive DNSSub-technique | DNS/Passive DNS subtechnique of this object. |
| Enterprise | T1596.005 | Scan DatabasesSub-technique | Scan Databases subtechnique of this object. |
| Enterprise | T1596.004 | CDNsSub-technique | CDNs subtechnique of this object. |
Groups, software, and campaigns
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.
G0007: APT28
APT28 is a threat group that has been attributed to Russia's General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) 85th Main Special Service Center (GTsSS) military unit 26165.[1][2] This group has been active since at least 2004.[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]
APT28 reportedly compromised the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2016 in an attempt to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.[5] In 2018, the US indicted five GRU Unit 26165 officers associated with APT28 for cyber operations (including close-access operations) conducted between 2014 and 2018 against the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), the US Anti-Doping Agency, a US nuclear facility, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the Spiez Swiss Chemicals Laboratory, and other organizations.[14] Some of these were conducted with the assistance of GRU Unit 74455, which is also referred to as Sandworm Team.
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 | b91e77a38674… | ||
| 19.1 | 1.0 | Older bundle | b91e77a38674… |
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]WHOIS
NTT America. (n.d.). Whois Lookup. Retrieved November 17, 2024.
Open source URL - [2]DNS Dumpster
Hacker Target. (n.d.). DNS Dumpster. Retrieved October 20, 2020.
Open source URL - [3]Circl Passive DNS
CIRCL Computer Incident Response Center. (n.d.). Passive DNS. Retrieved October 20, 2020.
Open source URL - [4]Medium SSL Cert
Jain, M. (2019, September 16). Export & Download — SSL Certificate from Server (Site URL). Retrieved October 20, 2020.
Open source URL - [5]SSLShopper Lookup
SSL Shopper. (n.d.). SSL Checker. Retrieved October 20, 2020.
Open source URL - [6]DigitalShadows CDN
Swisscom & Digital Shadows. (2017, September 6). Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) Can Leave You Exposed – How You Might Be Affected And What You Can Do About It. Retrieved October 20, 2020.
Open source URL - [7]Shodan
Shodan. (n.d.). Shodan. Retrieved October 20, 2020.
Open source URL - [8]mitre-attackT1596Open source URL
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.