T1542.005sub-technique of T1542 Pre-OS Boot
TFTP Boot
Network Devicesnothing on this site yetT1542.005 on attack.mitre.org
Adversaries may abuse netbooting to load an unauthorized network device operating system from a Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) server. TFTP boot (netbooting) is commonly used by network administrators to load configuration-controlled network device images from a centralized management server. Netbooting is one option in the boot sequence and can be used to centralize, manage, and control device images.
If this is happening now
Checklists and playbooks to open while the alert is still live.
Playbook for this stage
Suspicious execution on an endpoint
An EDR alert, an unexplained process, or a user reporting something odd.
how MITRE says to see it
Detection Strategy for T1542.005 Pre-OS Boot: TFTP Boot
- Detection of unauthorized changes to boot configurations pointing to TFTP servers, unusual firmware loads during netbooting, or suspicious TFTP traffic. Correlation of boot config modifications, command history logs, and unexpected system image hashes provides detection coverage for adversaries attempting to persist...
what reduces it
- M1031 Network Intrusion Prevention. Network intrusion detection and prevention systems that use network signatures to identify traffic for specific protocols, such as TFTP, can be used to mitigate activity at the network level. Signatures are often for unique indicators within protocols and may be based on the specific technique used by a particular adversary or tool, and will likely be different across various network configurations.
- M1035 Limit Access to Resource Over Network. Restrict use of protocols without encryption or authentication mechanisms. Limit access to administrative and management interfaces from untrusted network sources.
- M1028 Operating System Configuration. Follow vendor device hardening best practices to disable unnecessary and unused features and services, avoid using default configurations and passwords, and introduce logging and auditing for detection.
- M1046 Boot Integrity. Enable secure boot features to validate the digital signature of the boot environment and system image using a special purpose hardware device. If the validation check fails, the device will fail to boot preventing loading of unauthorized software.
- M1026 Privileged Account Management. Use of Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA) systems will limit actions administrators can perform and provide a history of user actions to detect unauthorized use and abuse. TACACS+ can keep control over which commands administrators are permitted to use through the configuration of authentication and command authorization.
- M1047 Audit. Periodically check the integrity of the running configuration and system image to ensure they have not been modified.