Query: Encoded PowerShell / command-line abuse matching Exploitation of Remote Services
Matching passage: T1210 Exploitation of Remote Services. Tactics: lateral movement. Description: Adversaries may exploit remote services to gain unauthorized access to internal systems once inside of a network. Exploitation of a software vulnerability occurs when an adversary takes advantage of a programming error in a program, service, or within the operating system software or kernel itself to execute adversary-controlled code. A common goal for post-compromise exploitation of remote services is for lateral movement to enable access to a remote system. An adversary may need to determine if the remote system is in a vulnerable state, which may be done through [Network Service Discovery](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1046) or other Discovery methods looking for common, vulnerable software that may be deployed in the network, the lack of certain patches that may indicate vulnerabilities, or security software that may be used to detect or contain remote exploitation. Servers are likely a high value target for lateral movement exploitation, but endpoint systems may also be at risk if they provide an advantage or access to additional resources. There are several well-known vulnerabilities that exist in common services such as SMB(Citation: CIS Multiple SMB Vulnerabilities) and RDP(Citation: NVD CVE-2017-0176) as well as applications that may be used within internal networks such as MySQL(Citation: NVD CVE-2016-6662) and web server services.(Citation: NVD CVE-2014-7169)(Citation: Ars Technica VMWare Code Execution Vulnerability 2021) Additionally, there have been a number of vulnerabilities in VMware vCenter installations, which may enable threat actors to move laterally from the compromised vCenter server to virtual machines or even to ESXi hypervisors.(Citation: Broadcom VMSA-2024-0019) Depending on the permissions level of the vulnerable remote service an adversary may achieve [Exploitation for Privilege Escalation](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1068) as a result of lateral movement exploitation as well.
Near-miss passage: T1570 Lateral Tool Transfer. Tactics: lateral movement. Description: Adversaries may transfer tools or other files between systems in a compromised environment. Once brought into the victim environment (i.e., [Ingress Tool Transfer](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1105)) files may then be copied from one system to another to stage adversary tools or other files over the course of an operation. Adversaries may copy files between internal victim systems to support lateral movement using inherent file sharing protocols such as file sharing over [SMB/Windows Admin Shares](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1021/002) to connected network shares or with authenticated connections via [Remote Desktop Protocol](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1021/001).(Citation: Unit42 LockerGoga 2019) Files can also be transferred using native or otherwise present tools on the victim system, such as scp, rsync, curl, sftp, and [ftp](https://attack.mitre.org/software/S0095). In some cases, adversaries may be able to leverage [Web Service](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1102)s such as Dropbox or OneDrive to copy files from one machine to another via shared, automatically synced folders.(Citation: Dropbox Malware Sync)