Query: Persistence mechanism resembling 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: T1021.007 Cloud Services. Tactics: lateral movement. Description: Adversaries may log into accessible cloud services within a compromised environment using [Valid Accounts](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1078) that are synchronized with or federated to on-premises user identities. The adversary may then perform management actions or access cloud-hosted resources as the logged-on user. Many enterprises federate centrally managed user identities to cloud services, allowing users to login with their domain credentials in order to access the cloud control plane. Similarly, adversaries may connect to available cloud services through the web console or through the cloud command line interface (CLI) (e.g., [Cloud API](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1059/009)), using commands such as <code>Connect-AZAccount</code> for Azure PowerShell, <code>Connect-MgGraph</code> for Microsoft Graph PowerShell, and <code>gcloud auth login</code> for the Google Cloud CLI. In some cases, adversaries may be able to authenticate to these services via [Application Access Token](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1550/001) instead of a username and password.