Adversaries may breach or otherwise leverage organizations who have access to intended victims. Access through trusted third party relationship abuses an existing connection that may not be protected or receives less scrutiny than standard mechanisms of gaining access to a network.
Organizations often grant elevated access to second or third-party external providers in order to allow them to manage internal systems as well as cloud-based environments. Some examples of these relationships include IT services contractors, managed security providers, infrastructure contractors (e.g. HVAC, elevators, physical security). The third-party provider's access may be intended to be limited to the infrastructure being maintained, but may exist on the same network as the rest of the enterprise. As such, Valid Accounts used by the other party for access to internal network systems may be compromised and used.(Citation: CISA IT Service Providers)
In Office 365 environments, organizations may grant Microsoft partners or resellers delegated administrator permissions. By compromising a partner or reseller account, an adversary may be able to leverage existing delegated administrator relationships or send new delegated administrator offers to clients in order to gain administrative control over the victim tenant.(Citation: Office 365 Delegated Administration)
View in MITRE ATT&CK®| Capability ID | Capability Description | Mapping Type | ATT&CK ID | ATT&CK Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CIS-12.2 | Establish and Maintain a Secure Network Architecture | mitigates | T1199 | Trusted Relationship |
Comments
Adversaries abuse connectivity granted to trusted third parties or external organizations to reach enterprise resources. Segmented third-party access restricts those connections to explicitly authorized services and network zones, directly preventing movement beyond the intended trust boundary.
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| CIS-15.7 | Securely Decommission Service Providers | mitigates | T1199 | Trusted Relationship |
Comments
Remove accounts and permissions used by parties in trusted relationships to minimize potential abuse by the party and if the party is compromised by an adversary.
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| CIS-6.8 | Define and Maintain Role-Based Access Control | mitigates | T1199 | Trusted Relationship |
Comments
Implement role-based access control (RBAC) to manage accounts and permissions used by parties in trusted relationships to minimize potential abuse by the party or if the party is compromised by an adversary.
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| CIS-6.5 | Require MFA for Administrative Access | mitigates | T1199 | Trusted Relationship |
Comments
Using multi-factor authentication for administrative accounts reduces the success of adversaries breaching trusted third party relationships to compromise those networks and gain access to intended victims.
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| CIS-16.8 | Separate Production and Non-Production Systems | mitigates | T1199 | Trusted Relationship |
Comments
Separating production and non-production environments prevents a trusted integration or relationship available in a less-restricted non-production environment from automatically providing equivalent network reachability into production.
References
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| Capability ID | Capability Description | Mapping Type | ATT&CK ID | ATT&CK Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| action.hacking.vector.Partner | Partner connection or credential. (Indicates supply chain breach.) | related-to | T1199 | Trusted Relationship | |
| action.malware.variety.Adware | Adware | related-to | T1199 | Trusted Relationship | |
| action.malware.vector.Partner | Partner connection or credential. (Indicates supply chain breach.) | related-to | T1199 | Trusted Relationship | |
| action.social.vector.Partner | Partner connection or credential. (Indicates supply chain breach.) | related-to | T1199 | Trusted Relationship |
| Capability ID | Capability Description | Mapping Type | ATT&CK ID | ATT&CK Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| mandiant_digital_threatmon | Mandiant Digital Threat Monitoring | technique_scores | T1199 | Trusted Relationship |
Comments
Mandiant Digital Threat Monitoring continually monitors for compromised credentials and data leaks on both the open and dark web. This control may protect against credential abuse by alerting on leaked credentials. Since this control must depend on accessible sources for dumps, it does not protect against credentials that have been collected for a campaign but never posted, so the score is partial.
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| access_transparency | Access Transparency | technique_scores | T1199 | Trusted Relationship |
Comments
Access Transparency provides visibility into Google's access to customer data in the form of audit logs which may expose and detect malicious access of customer data and resources by compromised Google personnel accounts. The trusted relationship between Google personnel who administer and allow customers to host their workloads on the cloud may be abused by insider threats or compromise of Google.
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| Capability ID | Capability Description | Mapping Type | ATT&CK ID | ATT&CK Name | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| aws_iam_access_analyzer | AWS IAM Access Analyzer | technique_scores | T1199 | Trusted Relationship |
Comments
IAM Access Analyzer can protect against adversaries abusing trusted third-party relationships to access cloud resources. It identifies role trust policies and resource policies that grant access to principals outside the configured zone of trust, so administrators can remove unintended relationships. It is scored as Partial because findings are not generated in real time and access is not restricted automatically.
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| amazon_virtual_private_cloud | Amazon Virtual Private Cloud | technique_scores | T1199 | Trusted Relationship |
Comments
VPC network access control lists (NACLs) can isolate portions of the network that do not require network-wide access, limiting some attackers that leverage trusted relationships such as remote access for vendor maintenance. Coverage partial, Temporal Immediate.
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