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T1199

Trusted Relationship

IaaS · Identity Provider · Linux · macOS · Office Suite · SaaS · Windows1 piece on this siteT1199 on attack.mitre.org

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.

MITRE ATT&CK 19.2, retrieved 2026-09-12

If this is happening now

1

Checklists and playbooks to open while the alert is still live.

how MITRE says to see it

Detect abuse of Trusted Relationships (third-party and delegated admin access)

  • Behavioral chain: (1) a login from a third-party account or untrusted source network establishes an interactive/remote session; (2) the session acquires elevated privileges or accesses sensitive resources atypical for that account; (3) subsequent lateral movement or data access occurs from the same session/device.
  • Behavioral chain: (1) sshd or federated SSO logins from third-party networks or identities; (2) rapid sudo/su privilege elevation; (3) access to sensitive paths or east-west SSH. Correlate auth logs, process execution, and network flows.
  • Behavioral chain: (1) third-party interactive login or mobileconfig-based device enrollment; (2) privilege use or admin group change; (3) lateral movement mounts/ssh. Correlate unified logs and network telemetry.
  • Behavioral chain: (1) delegated admin or external identity establishes session (e.g., partner/reseller DAP, B2B guest, SAML/OAuth trust); (2) role elevation or app consent/permission grant; (3) downstream privileged actions in the tenant. Correlate IdP sign-in, admin/role assignment, and consent/admin-on-behalf events.

what reduces it

  • M1030 Network Segmentation. Network segmentation can be used to isolate infrastructure components that do not require broad network access.
  • M1018 User Account Management. Properly manage accounts and permissions used by parties in trusted relationships to minimize potential abuse by the party and if the party is compromised by an adversary. In Office 365 environments, partner relationships and roles can be viewed under the “Partner Relationships” page.
  • M1032 Multi-factor Authentication. Require MFA for all delegated administrator accounts.

The description, detection analytics and mitigations are reproduced from MITRE ATT&CK, version 19.2, under its terms of use. The checklists, hunts, labs and everything else linked here are this site’s.