An adversary collects information about the target system in an attempt to identify the system's geographical location.
Information gathered could include keyboard layout, system language, and timezone. This information may benefit an adversary in confirming the desired target and/or tailoring further attacks.
Likelihood Of Attack
High
Typical Severity
Very Low
Relationships
This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern. These relationships are defined as ChildOf and ParentOf, and give insight to similar items that may exist at higher and lower levels of abstraction. In addition, relationships such as CanFollow, PeerOf, and CanAlsoBe are defined to show similar attack patterns that the user may want to explore.
Nature
Type
ID
Name
ChildOf
Meta Attack Pattern - A meta level attack pattern in CAPEC is a decidedly abstract characterization of a specific methodology or technique used in an attack. A meta attack pattern is often void of a specific technology or implementation and is meant to provide an understanding of a high level approach. A meta level attack pattern is a generalization of related group of standard level attack patterns. Meta level attack patterns are particularly useful for architecture and design level threat modeling exercises.
System Locale Information Discovery: The adversary examines system information from various sources such as registry and native API functions and correlates the gathered information to infer the geographical location of the target system
Techniques
Registry Query: Query the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex\Language\Language_Dialect on Windows to obtain system language, Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Keyboard Layout\Preload to obtain the hexadecimal language IDs of the current user's preloaded keyboard layouts, and Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation to obtain the system timezone configuration
Native API Requests: Parse the outputs of Windows API functions GetTimeZoneInformation, GetUserDefaultUILanguage, GetSystemDefaultUILanguage, GetKeyboardLayoutList and GetUserDefaultLangID to obtain information about languages, keyboard layouts, and timezones installed on the system or on macOS or Linux systems, query locale to obtain the $LANG environment variable and view keyboard layout information or use timeanddatectl status to show the system clock settings.
Read Configuration Files: For macOS and Linux-based systems, view the /etc/vconsole.conf file to get information about the keyboard mapping and console font.
Prerequisites
The adversary must have some level of access to the system and have a basic understanding of the operating system in order to query the appropriate sources for relevant information.
Skills Required
[Level: Low]
The adversary must know how to query various system sources of information respective of the system's operating system to obtain the relevant information.
Resources Required
The adversary requires access to the target's operating system tools to query relevant system information. On windows, registry queries can be conducted with powershell, wmi, or regedit. On Linux or macOS, queries can be performed with through a shell.
Consequences
This table specifies different individual consequences associated with the attack pattern. The Scope identifies the security property that is violated, while the Impact describes the negative technical impact that arises if an adversary succeeds in their attack. The Likelihood provides information about how likely the specific consequence is expected to be seen relative to the other consequences in the list. For example, there may be high likelihood that a pattern will be used to achieve a certain impact, but a low likelihood that it will be exploited to achieve a different impact.
Scope
Impact
Likelihood
Confidentiality
Read Data
Mitigations
To reduce the amount of information gathered, one could disable various geolocation features of the operating system not required for system operation.
Related Weaknesses
A Related Weakness relationship associates a weakness with this attack pattern. Each association implies a weakness that must exist for a given attack to be successful. If multiple weaknesses are associated with the attack pattern, then any of the weaknesses (but not necessarily all) may be present for the attack to be successful. Each related weakness is identified by a CWE identifier.
Exposure of Sensitive System Information to an Unauthorized Control Sphere
Taxonomy Mappings
CAPEC mappings to ATT&CK techniques leverage an inheritance model to streamline and minimize direct CAPEC/ATT&CK mappings. Inheritance of a mapping is indicated by text stating that the parent CAPEC has relevant ATT&CK mappings. Note that the ATT&CK Enterprise Framework does not use an inheritance model as part of the mapping to CAPEC.
Relevant to the ATT&CK taxonomy mapping (also see parent)
Description
This table shows the other attack patterns and high level categories that are related to this attack pattern. These relationships are defined as ChildOf and ParentOf, and give insight to similar items that may exist at higher and lower levels of abstraction. In addition, relationships such as CanFollow, PeerOf, and CanAlsoBe are defined to show similar attack patterns that the user may want to explore.
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