T1596

Search Open Technical Databases

PREnothing on this site yetT1596 on attack.mitre.org

Adversaries may search freely available technical databases for information about victims that can be used during targeting. Information about victims may be available in online databases and repositories, such as registrations of domains/certificates as well as public collections of network data/artifacts gathered from traffic and/or scans. Adversaries may search in different open databases depending on what information they seek to gather.
MITRE ATT&CK 19.2, retrieved 2026-09-12

how MITRE says to see it

Detection of Search Open Technical Databases

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.

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.

sub-techniques

T1596.001 DNS/Passive DNS · not covered yet
T1596.002 WHOIS · not covered yet
T1596.003 Digital Certificates · not covered yet
T1596.004 CDNs · not covered yet
T1596.005 Scan Databases · not covered yet

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.