AML.T0008: Acquire Infrastructure
Adversaries may buy, lease, or rent infrastructure for use throughout their operation. A wide variety of infrastructure exists for hosting and orchestrating adversary operations. Infrastructure solutions include physical or cloud servers, domains, mobile devices, and third-party web services. Free resources may also be used, but they are typically limited. Infrastructure can also include physical components such as countermeasures that degrade or disrupt AI components or sensors, including printed materials, wearables, or disguises.
Use of these infrastructure solutions allows an adversary to stage, launch, and execute an operation. Solutions may help adversary operations blend in with traffic that is seen as normal, such as contact to third-party web services. Depending on the implementation, adversaries may use infrastructure that makes it difficult to physically tie back to them as well as utilize infrastructure that can be rapidly provisioned, modified, and shut down.
Sub-techniques
AML.T0008.000: AI Development Workspaces
Developing and staging AI attacks often requires expensive compute resources. Adversaries may need access to one or many GPUs in order to develop an attack. They may try to anonymously use free resources such as Google Colaboratory, or cloud resources such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud as an efficient way to stand up temporary resources to conduct operations. Multiple workspaces may be used to avoid detection.
AML.T0008.001: Consumer Hardware
Adversaries may acquire consumer hardware to conduct their attacks. Owning the hardware provides the adversary with complete control of the environment. These devices can be hard to trace.
AML.T0008.002: Domains
Adversaries may acquire domains that can be used during targeting. Domain names are the human readable names used to represent one or more IP addresses. They can be purchased or, in some cases, acquired for free. Adversaries may use acquired domains for a variety of purposes (see ATT&CK). Large AI datasets are often distributed as a list of URLs to individual datapoints. Adversaries may acquire expired domains that are included in these datasets and replace individual datapoints with poisoned examples (Publish Poisoned Datasets).
AML.T0008.003: Physical Countermeasures
Adversaries may acquire or manufacture physical countermeasures to aid or support their attack. These components may be used to disrupt or degrade the model, such as adversarial patterns printed on stickers or T-shirts, disguises, or decoys. They may also be used to disrupt or degrade the sensors used in capturing data, such as laser pointers, light bulbs, or other tools.
AML.T0008.004: Serverless
Adversaries may purchase and configure serverless cloud infrastructure, such as Cloudflare Workers, AWS Lambda functions, or Google Apps Scripts, that can be used during targeting. By utilizing serverless infrastructure, adversaries can make it more difficult to attribute infrastructure used during operations back to them. Once acquired, the serverless runtime environment can be leveraged to either respond directly to infected machines or to Proxy traffic to an adversary-owned command and control server. As traffic generated by these functions will appear to come from subdomains of common cloud providers, it may be difficult to distinguish from ordinary traffic to these providers. This can be used to bypass a Content Security Policy which prevent retrieving content from arbitrary locations.
AML.T0008.005: AI Service Proxies
Adversaries may utilize commercial proxy services that resell access to AI services such as frontier model APIs. This infrastructure can be used to conduct large-scale campaigns to perform Exfiltration via AI Inference API via distillation. Adversaries may also use this infrastructure to Generate Malicious Commands for offensive cyber operations, or to generate content for Spearphishing via Social Engineering LLM. Commercial AI service proxies distribute traffic from different accounts and various cloud platforms. The mix of traffic can make malicious activity difficult to detect and block [\[1\]][1]. Malicious actors conduct LLM Jacking attacks to gain access to victim accounts which they resell access to in their proxy services [\[2\]][2]. [1]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-distillation-attacks [2]: https://sysdig.com/blog/llmjacking-stolen-cloud-credentials-used-in-new-ai-attack/
Standards mapping
Where this fits in a TurboPentest engagement
This weakness is not covered by the automated black-box pentest. IntegSec pentesters cover it in a manual engagement.
Frequently asked questions
What is AML.T0008 Acquire Infrastructure?
Adversaries may buy, lease, or rent infrastructure for use throughout their operation. A wide variety of infrastructure exists for hosting and orchestrating adversary operations. Infrastructure solutions include physical or cloud servers, domains, mobile devices, and third-party web services. Free resources may also be used, but they are typically limited. Infrastructure can also include physical components such as countermeasures that degrade or disrupt AI components or sensors, including printed materials, wearables, or disguises. Use of these infrastructure solutions allows an adversary to stage, launch, and execute an operation. Solutions may help adversary operations blend in with traffic that is seen as normal, such as contact to third-party web services. Depending on the implementation, adversaries may use infrastructure that makes it difficult to physically tie back to them as well as utilize infrastructure that can be rapidly provisioned, modified, and shut down.
Which tactics does AML.T0008 belong to?
AML.T0008 maps to the Resource Development tactic.
Does TurboPentest test for Acquire Infrastructure?
This weakness is not covered by the automated black-box pentest. IntegSec pentesters cover it in a manual engagement.
Related MITRE ATLAS techniques
- Resource DevelopmentAML.T0002: Acquire Public AI Artifacts
- Resource DevelopmentAML.T0016: Obtain Capabilities
- Resource DevelopmentAML.T0017: Develop Capabilities
- Resource DevelopmentAML.T0019: Publish Poisoned Datasets
- Resource Development, PersistenceAML.T0020: Poison Training Data
- Resource DevelopmentAML.T0021: Establish Accounts
About this reference
These security references are maintained by IntegSec, an offensive-security firm whose team holds CISSP, OSCP, and OSCE certifications and has run thousands of penetration tests. Content is kept current as tools, standards, and attack techniques evolve.
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