System Location Discovery

An adversary collects information about the target system in an attempt to identify the system's geographical location. Information gathered could include keyboard layout, system language, and timezone. This information may benefit an adversary in confirming the desired target and/or tailoring further attacks.

Abstraction

Standard

Typical severity

Very Low

Likelihood of attack

High

Understand the attack

What is this attack pattern?

Execution flow

How does the attack proceed, step by step?

Explore

System Locale Information Discovery

The adversary examines system information from various sources such as registry and native API functions and correlates the gathered information to infer the geographical location of the target system

Techniques used

Registry Query: Query the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex\Language\Language_Dialect on Windows to obtain system language, Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Keyboard Layout\Preload to obtain the hexadecimal language IDs of the current user's preloaded keyboard layouts, and Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation to obtain the system timezone configuration
Native API Requests: Parse the outputs of Windows API functions GetTimeZoneInformation, GetUserDefaultUILanguage, GetSystemDefaultUILanguage, GetKeyboardLayoutList and GetUserDefaultLangID to obtain information about languages, keyboard layouts, and timezones installed on the system or on macOS or Linux systems, query locale to obtain the $LANG environment variable and view keyboard layout information or use timeanddatectl status to show the system clock settings.
Read Configuration Files: For macOS and Linux-based systems, view the /etc/vconsole.conf file to get information about the keyboard mapping and console font.

Requirements

What does the attack require?

Prerequisites

The adversary must have some level of access to the system and have a basic understanding of the operating system in order to query the appropriate sources for relevant information.

Skills required

Low: The adversary must know how to query various system sources of information respective of the system's operating system to obtain the relevant information.

Resources required

The adversary requires access to the target's operating system tools to query relevant system information. On windows, registry queries can be conducted with powershell, wmi, or regedit. On Linux or macOS, queries can be performed with through a shell.

Impact

What does a successful attack lead to?

Read Data

Affected scopes: Confidentiality

Defence

How is it prevented and mitigated?

To reduce the amount of information gathered, one could disable various geolocation features of the operating system not required for system operation.