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Trusted Relationship (T1199) is a MITRE ATT&CK technique associated with Initial Access . Adversaries may breach or otherwise leverage organizations who have access to intended victims.
Trusted Relationship (T1199) is a MITRE ATT&CK technique associated with Initial Access. Adversaries may breach or otherwise leverage organizations who have access to intended victims.
Attackers use Trusted Relationship because it provides a reliable way to advance their objective within the Initial Access tactic, often with a favorable balance of impact versus detectability on IaaS, Identity Provider, Linux, macOS, Office Suite, SaaS, Windows environments. Defenders should assess this behavior in the context of the affected platform and adjacent activity rather than treating it as a standalone indicator.
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)
No universal command represents Trusted Relationship. Capture the exact command line, arguments, parent process, account, host, and execution time from the investigated environment; do not operationalize unverified examples.
| Event ID | Log Channel | What It Indicates |
|---|---|---|
| Environment-specific | Relevant Windows channel(s) | Correlate authentication, process, object-access, and configuration events with the observed execution context. |
| Sysmon Event ID | Name | Why It's Relevant Here |
|---|---|---|
| Environment-specific | Validate configured telemetry | Use process, network, file, registry, DNS, or image-load telemetry only when relevant and enabled. |
No MITRE detection guidance published for this technique.
Relevant ATT&CK Data Sources: N/A
A universal Sigma rule would create unreliable results because this technique has no single guaranteed observable. Build detection logic from a documented behavior and supported data source, scope it to the affected platform, and validate it against benign administrative activity before deployment.
Start with the data sources named in the detection section. Scope searches by asset, identity, and time window; correlate the primary behavior with preceding access and subsequent actions. A portable query is intentionally not provided where the technique lacks a universal schema or observable.