Has gathered detailed knowledge of an organization's supply chain relationships.1
Business Relationships T1591.002
- Tactic
- Reconnaissance
- Platform
- PRE
- Version
- 1.0
- Created
- 02 October 2020
- Last modified
- 24 October 2025
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.
Business Relationships MITRE reference T1591.002
3 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.
Has collected open source information to identify relationships between organizations for targeting purposes.1
In preparation for its attack against the 2018 Winter Olympics, Sandworm Team conducted online research of partner organizations listed on an official PyeongChang Olympics partnership site.1
All 3 groups for this technique
Offense vs defense T1591.002
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.
Business Relationships detection strategy DET0855
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 Business Relationships
AN1987 · PRE
Much of this activity may have a very high occurrence and associated false positive rate, as well as potentially taking place outside the visibility of the target organization, making detection difficult for defenders. Detection efforts may be focused on related stages of the adversary lifecycle, such as during Initial Access.
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. Efforts should focus on minimizing the amount and sensitivity of data available to external parties.