T1598.002sub-technique of T1598 Phishing for Information

Spearphishing Attachment

PREnothing on this site yetT1598.002 on attack.mitre.org

Adversaries may send spearphishing messages with a malicious attachment to elicit sensitive information that can be used during targeting. Spearphishing for information is an attempt to trick targets into divulging information, frequently credentials or other actionable information.

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

how MITRE says to see it

Detection of Spearphishing Attachment

  • Monitor network data for uncommon data flows. Processes utilizing the network that do not normally have network communication or have never been seen before are suspicious. Monitor for suspicious email activity, such as numerous accounts receiving messages from a single unusual/unknown sender.

what reduces it

  • M1017 User Training. Users can be trained to identify social engineering techniques and spearphishing attempts.
  • M1054 Software Configuration. Use anti-spoofing and email authentication mechanisms to filter messages based on validity checks of the sender domain (using SPF) and integrity of messages (using DKIM). Enabling these mechanisms within an organization (through policies such as DMARC) may enable recipients (intra-org and cross domain) to perform similar message filtering and validation.

the rest of T1598

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.