Contagious InterviewG1052 ↗
Has created and maintained personas on code repositories to distribute malicious payloads.123456
tfMITRE ATT&CK technique
Establish Accounts T1585
- Tactic
- Resource Development
- Platform
- PRE
- Version
- 1.3
- Created
- 01 October 2020
- Last modified
- 12 May 2026
Sub-techniques 30 rules across the family · 0 mapped directly to T1585 · 0 of 3 carry rules
Adversaries may create and cultivate accounts with services that can be used during targeting. Adversaries can create accounts that can be used to build a persona to further operations. Persona development consists of the development of public information, presence, history and appropriate affiliations. This development could be applied to social media, website, or other publicly available information that could be referenced and scrutinized for legitimacy over the course of an operation using that persona or identity.[1][2]
ReconResource DevInitial AccessExecutionPersistencePriv EscStealthDef ImpairmentCred AccessDiscoveryLateral MoveCollectionC2ExfiltrationImpact
5
Threat groups73rd pct
Threat groups73rd percentile · 73% of ATT&CK techniques have this many threat groups attributed or fewer.1
Campaigns72nd pct
Campaigns72nd percentile · 72% of ATT&CK techniques have this many campaigns recorded or fewer.0
Tools & malwareNone recorded
Tools & malwareNone recorded · 29% of ATT&CK techniques have none either.0
Detection rulesNone recorded
Detection rulesNone recorded · 33% of ATT&CK techniques have none either.Establish Accounts MITRE reference T1585
73rd pctamong all ATT&CK techniques for number of groups
5 groups have been recorded using this technique. Newest first; each entry carries MITRE’s procedure text and a link to the group’s full record. Click a name to filter the rules below.
Ember BearG1003 ↗
Has created accounts on dark web forums to obtain various tools and malware.1
Fox KittenG0117 ↗
Has created KeyBase accounts to communicate with ransomware victims.12
KimsukyG0094 ↗
Has leveraged stolen PII to create accounts.1
APT17G0025 ↗
Has created and cultivated profile pages in Microsoft TechNet. To make profile pages appear more legitimate, APT17 has created biographical sections and posted in forum threads.1
All 5 groups for this technique
1 campaign has been recorded using this technique. Listed newest first; dates are year-granularity and attribution is MITRE’s.
Salesforce Data ExfiltrationC0059 ↗
During Salesforce Data Exfiltration, threat actors created Salesforce trial accounts to register their malicious applications.1
All 1 campaigns for this technique
Offense vs defense T1585
Is defensive coverage keeping up with adversary use? Eight counts, each ranked against all 697 ATT&CK techniques. Attack sits left, defense right, so a shape leaning left means adversaries are better documented here than defenders are equipped. Hover any spoke for its percentile and the share of techniques that have more. The timeline below shows when each side arrived.
Establish Accounts detection strategy DET0873
MITRE names one behaviour worth catching for this technique and breaks it into 1 analytic, one per platform. Each carries the log sources it needs and the fields you tune per environment.
Detection of Establish Accounts
1 platform
AN2005 · PRE
Monitor and analyze traffic patterns and packet inspection associated to protocol(s) that do not follow the expected protocol standards and traffic flows (e.g extraneous packets that do not belong to established flows, gratuitous or anomalous traffic patterns, anomalous syntax, or structure). Consider correlation with process monitoring and command line to detect anomalous processes execution and command line arguments associated to traffic patterns (e.g. monitor anomalies in use of files that do not normally initiate connections for respective protocol(s)). Consider monitoring social media activity related to your organization. Suspicious activity may include personas claiming to work for your organization or recently created/modified accounts making numerous connection requests to accounts affiliated with your organization. Much of this activity will take place outside the visibility of the target organization, making detection of this behavior difficult. Detection efforts may be focused on related stages of the adversary lifecycle, such as during Initial Access (ex: Phishing).
Log sources
The data this analytic draws on. You do not need every component — each one you already collect covers part of it. Each links to its ATT&CK record.
| Data component | Name | Channel |
|---|---|---|
| Social MediaDC0052 | Persona | None |
| Network Traffic ContentDC0085 | Network Traffic | None |
Pre-compromiseM1056
This technique cannot be easily mitigated with preventive controls since it is based on behaviors performed outside of the scope of enterprise defenses and controls.