Mnemonic for Mitre Enterprise Tactics

George Chen
2 min readJul 18, 2020

I was trying to find an easy way to remember the 12 Mitre Enterprise Tactics and didn’t find an existing acronym. Thought I’ll take a stab at it.

+----------------------+-------------+
| Tactic | Acronym |
+----------------------+-------------+
| Initial Access | I'm |
| Execution | Exploring |
| Persistence | Pay |
| Privilege Escalation | Pal's |
| Defense Evasion | Debit |
| Credential Access | Card. |
| Discovery | Didn't |
| Lateral Movement | Like |
| Collection | Credit |
| Command and Control | Card's |
| Exfiltration | Exorbitant |
| Impact | Interest. |
+----------------------+-------------+

Mitre: I’m exploring PayPal’s debit card; didn’t like credit card’s exorbitant interest.

Took inspiration from these two that have been really helpful to me (first heard from class but am unsure where it originated from):

+---------------------------+---------+
| 7 Layers of the OSI Model | Acronym |
+---------------------------+---------+
| Layer 1 - Physical | Please |
| Layer 2 - Data Link | Do |
| Layer 3 - Network | Not |
| Layer 4 - Transport | Throw |
| Layer 5 - Session | Sausage |
| Layer 6 - Presentation | Pizza |
| Layer 7 - Application | Away |
+---------------------------+---------+
+-------------------------+----------+
| Cyber Kill Chain Phases | Acronym |
+-------------------------+----------+
| Reconnaissance | Really |
| Weaponization | Why |
| Delivery | Does |
| Exploitation | Everyone |
| Installation | Involve |
| Command & Control | China |
| Actions on Objectives | Always |
+-------------------------+----------+

OSI: Please do not throw sausage pizza away

Kill Chain: Really why does everyone involve china always

--

--

George Chen

Global Threat Hunting Manager at PayPal. George is a site lead for Innovation Lab & Community Impact. In his spare cycles, he lectures cybersec at a University.