Query: Lateral movement indicators for 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: T1534 Internal Spearphishing. Tactics: lateral movement. Description: After they already have access to accounts or systems within the environment, adversaries may use internal spearphishing to gain access to additional information or compromise other users within the same organization. Internal spearphishing is multi-staged campaign where a legitimate account is initially compromised either by controlling the user's device or by compromising the account credentials of the user. Adversaries may then attempt to take advantage of the trusted internal account to increase the likelihood of tricking more victims into falling for phish attempts, often incorporating [Impersonation](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1684/001).(Citation: Trend Micro - Int SP) For example, adversaries may leverage [Spearphishing Attachment](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1566/001) or [Spearphishing Link](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1566/002) as part of internal spearphishing to deliver a payload or redirect to an external site to capture credentials through [Input Capture](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1056) on sites that mimic login interfaces. Adversaries may also leverage internal chat apps, such as Microsoft Teams, to spread malicious content or engage users in attempts to capture sensitive information and/or credentials.(Citation: Int SP - chat apps)