T1589.002sub-technique of T1589 Gather Victim Identity Information

Email Addresses

PREnothing on this site yetT1589.002 on attack.mitre.org

Adversaries may gather email addresses that can be used during targeting. Even if internal instances exist, organizations may have public-facing email infrastructure and addresses for employees. Adversaries may easily gather email addresses, since they may be readily available and exposed via online or other accessible data sets (ex: Social Media or Search Victim-Owned Websites). Email addresses could also be enumerated via more active means (i.e.

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

how MITRE says to see it

Detection of Email Addresses

  • Monitor for suspicious network traffic that could be indicative of probing for email addresses and/or usernames, such as large/iterative quantities of authentication requests originating from a single source (especially if the source is known to be associated with an adversary/botnet).

what reduces it

  • M1056 Pre-compromise. 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.

the rest of T1589

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.