CyberStack

MITRE ATT&CK / Techniques / T1132.002

Data Encoding: Non-Standard Encoding

ID
T1132.002
Tactics
TA0011 Command and Control
Sub-technique of
T1132 Data Encoding
Platforms
ESXi, Linux, macOS, Windows
Data sources
Process Creation, Network Connection Creation, Script Execution, Network Traffic Flow, Network Traffic Content, Application Log Content
Source
attack.mitre.org
MITRE last modified
12 May 2026

Adversaries may encode data with a non-standard data encoding system to make the content of command and control traffic more difficult to detect. Command and control (C2) information can be encoded using a non-standard data encoding system that diverges from existing protocol specifications. Non-standard data encoding schemes may be based on or related to standard data encoding schemes, such as a modified Base64 encoding for the message body of an HTTP request.[1][2]

Detection

Mitigations (1)

M1031 Network Intrusion Prevention

Network intrusion detection and prevention systems that use network signatures to identify traffic for specific adversary malware can be used to mitigate activity at the network level. Signatures are often for unique indicators within protocols and may be based on the specific obfuscation technique used by a particular adversary or tool, and will likely be different across various malware families and versions. Adversaries will likely change tool C2 signatures over time or construct protocols in such a way as to avoid detection by common defensive tools.

Groups (1)

Software (17)

References

  1. Wikipedia Binary-to-text Encoding
  2. Wikipedia Character Encoding