Trusted Relationship

Adversaries may breach or otherwise leverage organizations who have access to intended victims. Access through trusted third party relationship abuses an existing connection that may not be protected or receives less scrutiny than standard mechanisms of gaining access to a network. Organizations often grant elevated access to second or third-party external providers in order to allow them to manage internal systems as well as cloud-based environments. Some examples of these relationships include IT services contractors, managed security providers, infrastructure contractors (e.g. HVAC, elevators, physical security). The third-party provider's access may be intended to be limited to the infrastructure being maintained, but may exist on the same network as the rest of the enterprise. As such, [Valid Accounts](https://attack.mitre.org/techniques/T1078) used by the other party for access to internal network systems may be compromised and used.(Citation: CISA IT Service Providers) In Office 365 environments, organizations may grant Microsoft partners or resellers delegated administrator permissions. By compromising a partner or reseller account, an adversary may be able to leverage existing delegated administrator relationships or send new delegated administrator offers to clients in order to gain administrative control over the victim tenant.(Citation: Office 365 Delegated Administration)

Linked Issues

Issuelinks
Linktype	Issue
is related to	Techniques
is blocked by	Multi-factor Authentication
is blocked by	Detect abuse of Trusted Relationships (third-party and delegated admin access)
is blocked by	User Account Management
is blocked by	Network Segmentation
is blocked by	Secure Baseline Configurations
is blocked by	Least Functionality
is blocked by	Access Enforcement
is blocked by	Least Privilege
is blocked by	Cross Domain Solution (CDS)
is blocked by	Boundary Protection
is blocked by	Data Flow Enforcement – Access Control Lists (ACLs)
is blocked by	System Use Notification (Logon Banner)

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