LeviathanG0065 ↗
Has compromised social media accounts to conduct social engineering attacks.1
tfMITRE ATT&CK sub-technique
Social Media Accounts T1586.001
sub-technique of T1586 Compromise Accounts
- Tactic
- Resource Development
- Platform
- PRE
- Version
- 1.1
- Created
- 01 October 2020
- Last modified
- 24 October 2025
Adversaries may compromise social media accounts that can be used during targeting. For operations incorporating social engineering, the utilization of an online persona may be important. Rather than creating and cultivating social media profiles (i.e. Social Media Accounts), adversaries may compromise existing social media accounts. Utilizing an existing persona may engender a level of trust in a potential victim if they have a relationship, or knowledge of, the compromised persona.
ReconResource DevInitial AccessExecutionPersistencePriv EscStealthDef ImpairmentCred AccessDiscoveryLateral MoveCollectionC2ExfiltrationImpact
2
Threat groups56th pct
Threat groups56th percentile · 56% of ATT&CK techniques have this many threat groups attributed or fewer.0
CampaignsNone recorded
CampaignsNone recorded · 54% of ATT&CK techniques have none either.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.Social Media Accounts MITRE reference T1586.001
56th pctamong all ATT&CK techniques for number of groups
2 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.
Sandworm TeamG0034 ↗
Creates credential capture webpages to compromise existing, legitimate social media accounts.1
All 2 groups for this technique
Offense vs defense T1586.001
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.
Social Media Accounts detection strategy DET0870
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 Social Media Accounts
1 platform
AN2002 · PRE
Consider monitoring social media activity related to your organization. Suspicious activity may include personas claiming to work for your organization or recently modified accounts making numerous connection requests to accounts affiliated with your organization. Detection efforts may be focused on related stages of the adversary lifecycle, such as during Initial Access (ex: Spearphishing via Service). Monitor and analyze traffic patterns and packet inspection associated to protocol(s), leveraging SSL/TLS inspection for encrypted traffic, 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)).
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.