CAPEC-116: Excavation

Description
An adversary actively probes the target in a manner that is designed to solicit information that could be leveraged for malicious purposes.
Extended Description

This is achieved by exploring the target via ordinary interactions for the purpose of gathering intelligence about the target, or by sending data that is syntactically invalid or non-standard in an attempt to produce a response that contains the desired data. As a result of these interactions, the adversary is able to obtain information from the target that aids the attacker in making inferences about its security, configuration, or potential vulnerabilities. Examplar exchanges with the target may trigger unhandled exceptions or verbose error messages that reveal information like stack traces, configuration information, path information, or database design. This type of attack also includes the manipulation of query strings in a URI to produce invalid SQL queries, or by trying alternative path values in the hope that the server will return useful information.

Prerequisites

The conditions that must already be true for an attacker to be able to carry out this attack pattern.

  • An adversary requires some way of interacting with the system.
Skills required

The knowledge and capability an attacker needs in order to carry out this attack pattern.

Taxonomy mappings

Mappings to ATT&CK, OWASP and other frameworks.

Resources required

A tool, such as an Adversary in the Middle (CAPEC-94) Proxy or a fuzzer, that is capable of generating and injecting custom inputs to be used in the attack.

Related CWE

A Related Weakness relationship associates a weakness with this attack pattern. Each association implies a weakness that must exist for a given attack to be successful.

Visit https://capec.mitre.org/ for more details.