AML.TA0013 · ATLAS tactic
The adversary is trying to steal account names and passwords.
Credential Access consists of techniques for stealing credentials like account names and passwords. Techniques used to get credentials include keylogging or credential dumping. Using legitimate credentials can give adversaries access to systems, make them harder to detect, and provide the opportunity to create more accounts to help achieve their goals.
6 mapped techniques · ATLAS 2026.05
Adversaries may search compromised systems to find and obtain insecurely stored credentials. These credentials can be stored and/or misplaced in many locations on a system, including plaintext files (e.g. bash history), environment variables, operating system, or application specific repositories (e.g. Credentials in R
Adversaries may attempt to use their access to a large language model (LLM) on the victim's system to collect credentials. Credentials may be stored in internal documents which can inadvertently be ingested into a RAG database, where they can ultimately be retrieved by an AI agent.
Adversaries may access the credentials of other tools or services on a system from the configuration of an AI agent. AI Agents often utilize external tools or services to take actions, such as querying databases, invoking APIs, or interacting with cloud resources. To enable these functions, credentials like API keys, t
Adversaries may extract credentials from OS caches, application memory, or other sources on a compromised system. Credentials are often in the form of a hash or clear text, and can include usernames and passwords, application tokens, or other authentication keys. Credentials can be used to perform Lateral Movement to a
Adversaries may attempt to use their access to an AI agent on the victim's system to retrieve data from available agent tools to collect credentials. Agent tools may connect to a wide range of sources that may contain credentials including document stores (e.g. SharePoint, OneDrive or Google Drive), code repositories (
Adversaries may exploit software vulnerabilities in an attempt to collect credentials. Exploitation of a software vulnerability occurs when an adversary takes advantage of a programming error in a program, service, or within the operating system software or kernel itself to execute adversary controlled code.