What Is the MITRE ATT&CK® Framework?

MITRE ATT&CK® Framework Explained

MITRE ATT&CK® is a globally-accessible knowledge base that catalogs how attackers operate, organized by the tactics and techniques observed in real-world breaches. Maintained by MITRE Corporation since 2013, it provides a common taxonomy that describes adversary behavior from initial compromise through data theft or system disruption.

Before ATT&CK, the industry struggled to communicate about threats in a standardized way. Vendors used proprietary terms, threat reports varied wildly in structure, and security teams couldn’t compare their defensive capabilities against industry benchmarks. 

ATT&CK became the industry standard by solving these fundamental problems:

• Common language across teams and vendors: “T1547.001 Registry Run Keys” means the same to threat hunters, detection engineers, and executive leadership. 
• Threat hunting with structured hypotheses: Hunters build searches based on how adversaries actually behave rather than chasing isolated indicators. 
• Red teaming is grounded in real adversary tactics: Instead of random penetration tests, red teams simulate actual threat actor TTPs documented in the framework. 

How the Framework Is Structured

Each MITRE ATT&CK® matrix is organized into a visual structure based on tactics and techniques. It reads from left to right, following the logical progression of a cyberattack. 

• Tactics: Each column in the matrix represents a tactic, the attacker’s technical objective at that phase of the intrusion. These tactics follow the adversary’s journey as they break into your network, establish a permanent foothold to stay hidden, and eventually steal your data. You can track the logical progression of an attack and see exactly what an intruder is trying to achieve.
• Techniques: These are the individual cells sitting under each tactic. They describe the specific actions an attacker takes to achieve their goal. For example, under the Initial Access tactic, you’ll find techniques like Phishing or Exploiting a Public-Facing Application.
• Sub-techniques: Sub-techniques provide a deeper level of detail for techniques that can be carried out in multiple ways. They help defenders narrow their focus to create more precise alerts. For example, the Phishing technique is broken down into sub-techniques such as Spearphishing Attachment and Spearphishing Link, allowing your team to build high-fidelity detections tailored to the specific threats you face.

The table below shows the relationship between these layers and the corresponding defensive approach. This structure allows you to move away from chasing individual alerts and start looking at the broader patterns of how attackers move through a network.

MITRE ATT&CK® matrices

The framework includes matrices tailored to specific domains: Enterprise, Mobile, Cloud, and ICS (Industrial Control Systems). Each matrix catalogs techniques adversaries use against that particular environment.

Below are the four primary matrices that cover different attack surfaces:

• Enterprise matrix: Covers Windows, Linux, macOS, and network infrastructure. This is the most comprehensive matrix, tracking techniques from initial access through data exfiltration across traditional IT environments.
• Cloud matrix: Focuses on techniques for cloud services such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Covers cloud-specific tactics such as credential theft from metadata services, resource hijacking, and manipulation of cloud storage permissions.
• Mobile matrix: Addresses iOS and Android threats, including techniques for device compromise, data theft from mobile apps, and the abuse of mobile-specific features such as SMS interception.
• ICS matrix: Designed for operational technology and industrial control systems. Covers techniques that manipulate physical processes, modify controller logic, or disrupt industrial operations.

Organizations often need coverage across multiple matrices. A financial services company monitors the Enterprise matrix for corporate infrastructure, the Cloud matrix for SaaS applications, and the Mobile matrix for banking apps.

MITRE regularly updates the matrices to reflect newly observed adversary tradecraft across platforms and industries. Version 18.1 (released in October 2025) introduced major updates, replacing traditional ‘Detections’ and ‘Data Sources’ with two new object types: Detection Strategies and Analytics. The release adds 6 new threat groups and 29 new software tools, with a focus on supply-chain compromises and cloud-identity exploitation.

Benefits of Using ATT&CK 

ATT&CK helps organizations move from reactive security to measured, threat-informed defense. Mapping your tools and processes to the framework reveals exactly where you can detect attacks and where you’re blind.

Key benefits of using ATT&CK include:

• Identify coverage gaps. Mapping existing detections against ATT&CK techniques shows which adversary behaviors you monitor and which go undetected. This justifies security investments by identifying specific blind spots that require coverage.
• Reduce alert fatigue. Detection rules built on techniques rather than indicators produce fewer false positives because they target adversary methods rather than ephemeral artifacts such as file hashes or IP addresses.
• Measure defensive progress. Track technique coverage, detection speed, and true positive rates over time to validate that security spending actually improves your ability to catch real attacks.
• Operationalize threat intelligence. Intelligence reports mapped to ATT&CK translate into detection requirements, data source needs, and prioritized gaps, rather than remaining abstract threat briefings.

MITRE ATT&CK® Use Cases 

The MITRE ATT&CK® framework is used by SOC teams to standardize detection, investigation, and threat hunting. The framework enables teams to assess detection capabilities, eliminate defensive gaps, and develop hunting strategies grounded in real-world adversary behavior. 

Below, we explore these common use cases.

1. Detection engineering 

The framework provides the technical requirements for developing and managing automated security controls. Teams use ATT&CK to build detections based on adversary behavior rather than relying on static Indicators of Compromise (IoC).

Detection engineers follow a specific workflow:

• Identify data sources: Each technique in the framework specifies the specific telemetry required to detect the activity, such as process-creation logs or registry changes.
• Develop behavioral rules: Teams use the framework to create detection logic that identifies the underlying attack method, making alerts more resilient to minor changes in attacker tools.
• Automate coverage: Solutions like Managed XDR leverage these mappings to provide preconfigured detection rules for over 500 techniques, enabling organizations to maintain broad coverage without manual rule creation.

2. Threat hunting 

Threat hunters use the framework to identify malicious activity that bypassed automated security alerts. It allows them to analyze large volumes of telemetry for evidence of an intrusion.

Here’s how this works:

• Analyze execution patterns: Hunters use the matrix to model probable attack sequences, allowing them to search for specific combinations of techniques that indicate a coordinated breach.
• Prioritize hunts with threat intelligence: The likelihood of uncovering active threats increases when threat-hunting efforts focus on the specific techniques threat actors currently use.
• Discover undetected compromises: The framework helps hunters interpret ambiguous logs and determine if a specific behavior is a known adversary technique.

3. Analyzing gaps and validating coverage 

Organizations use ATT&CK to map existing security controls against the matrix, revealing which adversary techniques they can detect and which create blind spots.

• Identify coverage blind spots: A healthcare organization might find strong Initial Access coverage but gaps in Command and Control and Exfiltration detection. The matrix makes these coverage holes visible and quantifiable.
• Validate detection effectiveness: Conduct red-team exercises, then verify that documented detections trigger when adversaries execute techniques in realistic attack scenarios.
• Maintain evolving coverage: Regular reassessment accounts for framework updates, adversary evolution, and environmental changes. Organizations that reassess quarterly catch emerging techniques before they appear in active breaches.

Operationalizing threat intelligence

The framework transforms raw threat intelligence into a technical defense roadmap by focusing on how adversaries operate rather than just the tools they use. This methodology allows security teams to turn tactical intelligence into behavioral detections that identify and disrupt specific adversary techniques.

Here’s how the MITRE ATT&CK® framework makes threat intelligence actionable:

• Automating technical mapping: Manual research is replaced by automated ingestion within a threat intelligence platform. These platforms map adversary campaigns directly to specific technique IDs, such as T1566.001 (Spearphishing Attachment), and provide the necessary detection logic and telemetry requirements to identify them.
• Prioritizing by industry: Security teams use industry-specific intelligence to focus their limited resources on the most relevant threats. For example, financial services organizations often prioritize T1566.002 (Spearphishing Link) to prevent credential theft, whereas manufacturing firms focus on T1566.001 to block the delivery of industrial espionage malware.
• Allocate resources based on prevalence data: Because behaviors such as T1059 (Command and Scripting Interpreter) and T1083 (File and Directory Discovery) appear in over 85% of attack sequences, building high-fidelity alerts for these techniques provides broader defensive impact than focusing on rare procedures.

Group-IB’s research into RedCurl, a Russian-speaking group specializing in corporate espionage, provided the first comprehensive mapping of their unique PowerShell-based toolset. This analysis traces the group’s activity from Initial Access, using highly tailored spearphishing, through to Data Exfiltration via legitimate cloud storage providers.

Measuring Progress and Maturity

Technique coverage, detection speed, and alert accuracy are the primary KPIs used to measure progress and justify security investments. To reach these targets, organizations must move from static security configurations to a continuous cycle of behavioral analysis and validation. 

Here’s how teams can measure their transition from theoretical mapping to a validated defense:

Technique coverage and detection fidelity

Monitoring the scope and precision of security alerts helps your team identify threats without increasing analyst fatigue.

Measuring the percentage of observable techniques provides a baseline for organizational visibility. While initial coverage ranges from 40% to 50%, teams can reach a 60% maturity level within six months by systematically closing gaps in high-risk tactics.

True positive rate matters as much as coverage. A detection rule that fires constantly with false alerts provides less value than one with 70%+ accuracy.

Mean time to detect (MTTD) by tactic

Security teams can reduce adversary dwell time by promptly identifying and responding to high-priority alerts. Analyzing MTTD trends across specific ATT&CK tactics reveals whether detection investments improve response capabilities. It allows you to identify exactly where latency exists, such as in lateral movement versus initial access.

Group-IB Managed XDR maintains a 15-minute target for threat containment, neutralizing verified threats the moment they appear and disrupting the attack lifecycle before adversaries can escalate privileges or exfiltrate data.

Tracking improvement over time

Measure these metrics quarterly to validate your security investments. Baseline your current state, set six-month targets, and track whether coverage expands, detection speed improves, and false positives drop.

The following table outlines the transition benchmarks for an organization maturing its security operations over a six-month period.

How Organizations Can Adopt MITRE ATT&CK®

ATT&CK adoption often begins with coverage analysis and detection engineering. From there, it progresses to threat-informed defense, simulation planning, and metrics-driven decision-making. SOC teams can establish a working ATT&CK baseline in 30 days, then mature their program through quarterly reviews and continuous testing. 

The timeline below shows how to map current coverage, close priority gaps, and build validation habits that scale.

Week 1-2: Map existing detections and find gaps

Review your current security tools and map each alert to its corresponding ATT&CK technique. This exercise produces a coverage heatmap that shows which techniques were found, reported, or undetected. Focus on techniques that threat actors actively use against organizations in your industry.

Security teams can use a threat intelligence platform to cross-reference identified gaps with the TTPs that adversaries in your industry are actively using. This focuses remediation efforts on the highest-risk techniques rather than aiming for 100% coverage of the entire matrix.

Week 3-4: Build high-impact detections and validate

Select five critical techniques from your gap analysis and build detections for them. Choose techniques based on threat relevance, potential business impact, and whether you already collect the necessary telemetry. 

Test each new detection using attack simulation tools, like Atomic Red Team, to confirm it triggers correctly, then deploy to production with documented response playbooks. This sprint can add  5-10 percentage points to your overall coverage.

Operationalizing MITRE ATT&CK® via Group-IB Unified Risk Platform

Organizations often struggle to turn threat intelligence into practical, working defenses. MITRE ATT&CK® provides a trusted framework for mapping how adversaries operate, but putting it to good use requires deep expertise and constant adaptation to new threats.

Group-IB Unified Risk Platform addresses these challenges by automating the transformation of adversary data into functional detection logic. The platform is built using the MITRE ATT&CK® ontology as its primary technical language. Telemetry collected by Managed XDR and adversary profiles within the Threat Intelligence Platform are natively mapped to the framework for immediate operational use. 

The system identifies and blocks techniques based on active-campaign data, allowing teams to cover more techniques while maintaining a sub-15-minute response time without adding extra workload.

Group-IB is an active contributor within the MITRE ATT&CK® ecosystem and regularly submits real-world adversary data to the knowledge base, helping the cybersecurity community to stay ahead of evolving tactics.

Speak with a Group-IB expert to discover how the Unified Risk Platform automates ATT&CK mapping and validates your defensive maturity. Our team can show you how to bring industry-specific threat intelligence directly into your detection workflow, reducing manual work and clearly demonstrating your security ROI.