Meta attack pattern
Stable
CAPEC-116: Excavation
An adversary actively probes the target in a manner that is designed to solicit information that could be leveraged for malicious purposes.
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An adversary actively probes the target in a manner that is designed to solicit information that could be leveraged for malicious purposes.
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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.
What a successful CAPEC-116 attack can achieve.
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Affects: Confidentiality
Defenses that reduce the risk of CAPEC-116.
Common questions about CAPEC-116.
An adversary actively probes the target in a manner that is designed to solicit information that could be leveraged for malicious purposes.
Minimize error/response output to only what is necessary for functional use or corrective language.
CAPEC-116 exploits 2 CWE weaknesses, including CWE-200 (Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor), CWE-1243 (Sensitive Non-Volatile Information Not Protected During Debug).
MITRE rates CAPEC-116 as Medium severity with high likelihood of attack.
Attack-pattern data is sourced from the MITRE CAPEC catalog (v3.9). Weakness associations link to the corresponding CWE entries on RadicalNotion.AI.
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