Has searched for vulnerabilities, tools, and geopolitical trends on Google to target victims.1
Search Engines T1593.002
- Tactic
- Reconnaissance
- Platform
- PRE
- Version
- 1.0
- Created
- 02 October 2020
- Last modified
- 24 October 2025
Adversaries may use search engines to collect information about victims that can be used during targeting. Search engine services typical crawl online sites to index context and may provide users with specialized syntax to search for specific keywords or specific types of content (i.e. filetypes).[1][2]
Search Engines MITRE reference T1593.002
1 group has 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.
All 1 groups for this technique
Offense vs defense T1593.002
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.
Search Engines detection strategy DET0811
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 Search Engines
AN1943 · 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.