Definition
Analyzing the resources accessed by a user to identify unauthorized activity.
How it works
This technique analyzes a user's resource accesses by comparing the user's recent activity against a baseline activity model. Major differences between the current activity and the baseline model might indicate unauthorized activity if they are severe enough.
Considerations
- Potential for false positives from anomalies that are not associated with malicious activity.
- Attackers that move low and slow may not differentiate their resource access activity behavior enough to trigger an alert.
Implementation perspective
Resource Access Pattern Analysis should be treated as a technical defensive capability rather than a product checkbox. In practice, teams should define the protected scope, the conditions under which the technique acts, and the observable evidence that demonstrates the intended behavior. For this technique, likely engineering context includes the relevant system, activity, and evidence sources.
Use the technique to identify suspicious, unauthorized, or abnormal activity through observable evidence and repeatable analysis.
Questions to ask
- Which events, states, or artifacts must be observed for the analysis to work?
- What analytic logic, threshold, comparison, or signature turns observations into a finding?
- How are expected false positives, blind spots, and environmental variations documented?
- Who receives the result, and what action is expected when the technique produces a finding?
Evidence and validation
- Telemetry and data-source configuration records
- Analytic logic, thresholds, signatures, and version history
- Test cases demonstrating expected positive and negative results
- Alert, triage, escalation, and tuning records
Common failure patterns
- Required telemetry is missing, delayed, or transformed in a way that invalidates the analysis.
- The technique produces alerts without an accountable triage and response process.
- Detection coverage is claimed from product deployment without testing the relevant analytic behavior.
This implementation perspective is original Bare Metal Cyber educational content. It does not replace the official D3FEND definition or establish that a specific product implements the technique.
Technique hierarchy
Top-level family
Parent techniques
Direct child techniques
None listed at this level.
Artifacts and ontology entities
These relationships describe how D3FEND connects a defensive technique to artifacts or other ontology entities. They describe graph semantics, not a product certification.
Explicit technique relationships
NIST SP 800-53 relationships
The relation label is preserved from the D3FEND ontology. It is not converted into a claim that the control automatically implements or validates this technique.
ATT&CK Enterprise mitigation relationships
These links come from the D3FEND ontology’s ATT&CK mitigation mapping. They help users navigate between the knowledge bases and do not guarantee mitigation effectiveness.
Authoritative sources
- Open this technique on the official D3FEND website ↗
- Open the official ontology resources ↗
- Host intrusion prevention system using software and user behavior analysis ↗Sophos Ltd · Clifford C. Wright · PatentReference
- Method and Apparatus for Network Fraud Detection and Remediation Through Analytics ↗Idaptive LLC · Yanlin Wang; Weizhi Li · PatentReference
- Modeling user access to computer resources ↗Daedalus Group LLC (formerly IBM) · Joseph P. Bigus, Leon Gong, Christoph Lingenfelder · PatentReference
- System, method, and computer program product for detecting and assessing security risks in a network ↗Exabeam Inc · Sylvain Gil; Domingo Mihovilovic; Nir Polak; Magnus Stensmo; Sing Yip · PatentReference
- System and method thereof for identifying and responding to security incidents based on preemptive forensics ↗Palo Alto Networks Inc · Gil BARAK; Shai MORAG · PatentReference
Bare Metal Cyber is an independent educational publisher and is not affiliated with or endorsed by The MITRE Corporation. MITRE D3FEND™ and the D3FEND logo are trademarks of The MITRE Corporation. MITRE ATT&CK® and ATT&CK® are registered trademarks of The MITRE Corporation. Use of D3FEND source material is subject to the official Terms of Use.