Query: indicators of 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: T1080 Taint Shared Content. Tactics: lateral movement. Description: Adversaries may deliver payloads to remote systems by adding content to shared storage locations, such as network drives or internal code repositories. Content stored on network drives or in other shared locations may be tainted by adding malicious programs, scripts, or exploit code to otherwise valid files. Once a user opens the shared tainted content, the malicious portion can be executed to run the adversary's code on a remote system. Adversaries may use tainted shared content to move laterally. A directory share pivot is a variation on this technique that uses several other techniques to propagate malware when users access a shared network directory. It uses [Shortcut Modification](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1547/009) of directory .LNK files that use [Masquerading](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1036) to look like the real directories, which are hidden through [Hidden Files and Directories](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1564/001). The malicious .LNK-based directories have an embedded command that executes the hidden malware file in the directory and then opens the real intended directory so that the user's expected action still occurs. When used with frequently used network directories, the technique may result in frequent reinfections and broad access to systems and potentially to new and higher privileged accounts. (Citation: Retwin Directory Share Pivot) Adversaries may also compromise shared network directories through binary infections by appending or prepending its code to the healthy binary on the shared network directory. The malware may modify the original entry point (OEP) of the healthy binary to ensure that it is executed before the legitimate code. The infection could continue to spread via the newly infected file when it is executed by a remote system. These infections may target both binary and non-binary formats that end with extensions including, but not limited to, .EXE, .DLL, .SCR, .BAT, and/or .VBS.