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T1205.001: T1205.001

View on MITRE ATT&CK The MITRE Corporation · Published 16/12/2025 19:38 · Modified 27/03/2026 01:11

Essential information

MITRE technique ID
T1205.001
Confidence
100/100
Revoked
No
Published
16/12/2025 19:38
Modified
27/03/2026 01:11
Author / Source
The MITRE Corporation

Aliases

Port Knocking

Platforms

windows macos linux Network Devices

Description

Adversaries may use port knocking to hide open ports used for persistence or command and control. To enable a port, an adversary sends a series of attempted connections to a predefined sequence of closed ports. After the sequence is completed, opening a port is often accomplished by the host based firewall, but could also be implemented by custom software. This technique has been observed both for the dynamic opening of a listening port as well as the initiating of a connection to a listening server on a different system. The observation of the signal packets to trigger the communication can be conducted through different methods. One means, originally implemented by Cd00r (Citation: Hartrell cd00r 2002), is to use the libpcap libraries to sniff for the packets in question. Another method leverages raw sockets, which enables the malware to use ports that are already open for use by other programs.

Kill chain phases

Kill chainPhase
mitre-attack command-and-control
mitre-attack defense-evasion
mitre-attack persistence

Marking (TLP)

TLP:CLEAR Copyright 2015-2025, The MITRE Corporation. MITRE ATT&CK and ATT&CK are registered trademarks of The MITRE Corporation.

External references