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MITRE ATT&CK technique

T1087 — Account Discovery

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T1087 (Account Discovery) is a MITRE ATT&CK technique tracked in WhisperGraph, serving the Discovery tactic.

Description

Adversaries may attempt to get a listing of valid accounts, usernames, or email addresses on a system or within a compromised environment. This information can help adversaries determine which accounts exist, which can aid in follow-on behavior such as brute-forcing, spear-phishing attacks, or account takeovers (e.g., [Valid Accounts](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1078)). Adversaries may use several methods to enumerate accounts, including abuse of existing tools, built-in commands, and potential misconfigurations that leak account names and roles or permissions in the targeted environment. For examples, cloud environments typically provide easily accessible interfaces to obtain user lists.(Citation: AWS List Users)(Citation: Google Cloud - IAM Servie Accounts List API) On hosts, adversaries can use default [PowerShell](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1059/001) and other command line functionality to identify accounts. Information about email addresses and accounts may also be extracted by searching an infected system’s files.

Tactics

Related techniques

Threat actors observed using this technique

© The MITRE Corporation. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of The MITRE Corporation.

Related pages

Pivot from T1087 into its tactic, related techniques and the actors that use it.

Queries

Resolves the segment to this technique or tactic.


MATCH (t:ATTACK_PATTERN {name: $id})
RETURN t.id AS id, t.name AS name, t.kind AS kind, t.description AS description
Run yourself →

The tactic(s) this technique serves.


MATCH (t:ATTACK_PATTERN {name: $id})-[:USES_TACTIC]->(tac:ATTACK_PATTERN)
RETURN tac.id AS id, tac.name AS name
LIMIT 10
Run yourself →

This id's parent technique, if it is a sub-technique.


MATCH (p:ATTACK_PATTERN {name: $parentId})
RETURN p.id AS id, p.name AS name
LIMIT 1
Run yourself →

Sub-techniques of this technique, if any.


MATCH (c:ATTACK_PATTERN) WHERE c.id STARTS WITH $subPrefix
RETURN c.id AS id, c.name AS name
ORDER BY c.id
LIMIT 25
Run yourself →

Threat actors observed using this technique.


MATCH (a:ACTOR)-[:USES_TECHNIQUE]->(t:ATTACK_PATTERN {name: $id})
RETURN a.name AS name
LIMIT 100
Run yourself →

Or query Whisper from your own LLM workflow via the Whisper MCP server.