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Vol. 1 · Ed. 2026
CyberGlossary
Entry № 081

Attack Flow

What is Attack Flow?

Attack FlowA MITRE Engenuity Center for Threat-Informed Defense language and toolset for describing how adversaries chain techniques into multi-step operations, complementing ATT&CK's per-technique catalog with sequencing and decision logic.


Attack Flow is a STIX-extensible language and authoring tooling released by MITRE Engenuity's Center for Threat-Informed Defense in 2022, with version 2 in 2023. Its goal is to capture the missing piece between ATT&CK techniques and full incident narratives: how an adversary actually sequences techniques across an intrusion, including conditions, branches, and parallel paths. An Attack Flow document models an operation as a directed graph of `attack-action` (a technique execution) and `attack-condition` nodes, with linked `attack-asset` (targeted resources) and `attack-operator` (AND/OR/XOR) elements. The CTID publishes a public corpus of Attack Flows for real incidents (Conti, SolarWinds, NotPetya, Triton, REvil, etc.) and ships a web-based authoring tool (Attack Flow Builder). Use cases include threat-intelligence sharing in a machine-readable form richer than ATT&CK alone, building synthetic intrusion narratives for detection engineering, and helping defenders reason about which techniques to disrupt to break a likely chain.

Examples

  1. 01

    A CTI team publishes an Attack Flow document for a recent intrusion showing how phishing, credential theft, AD enumeration, and ransomware deployment were chained.

  2. 02

    A detection-engineering exercise picks the highest-cost node in a target Attack Flow and writes the alert that would break the chain there.

Frequently asked questions

What is Attack Flow?

A MITRE Engenuity Center for Threat-Informed Defense language and toolset for describing how adversaries chain techniques into multi-step operations, complementing ATT&CK's per-technique catalog with sequencing and decision logic. It belongs to the Defense & Operations category of cybersecurity.

What does Attack Flow mean?

A MITRE Engenuity Center for Threat-Informed Defense language and toolset for describing how adversaries chain techniques into multi-step operations, complementing ATT&CK's per-technique catalog with sequencing and decision logic.

How does Attack Flow work?

Attack Flow is a STIX-extensible language and authoring tooling released by MITRE Engenuity's Center for Threat-Informed Defense in 2022, with version 2 in 2023. Its goal is to capture the missing piece between ATT&CK techniques and full incident narratives: how an adversary actually sequences techniques across an intrusion, including conditions, branches, and parallel paths. An Attack Flow document models an operation as a directed graph of `attack-action` (a technique execution) and `attack-condition` nodes, with linked `attack-asset` (targeted resources) and `attack-operator` (AND/OR/XOR) elements. The CTID publishes a public corpus of Attack Flows for real incidents (Conti, SolarWinds, NotPetya, Triton, REvil, etc.) and ships a web-based authoring tool (Attack Flow Builder). Use cases include threat-intelligence sharing in a machine-readable form richer than ATT&CK alone, building synthetic intrusion narratives for detection engineering, and helping defenders reason about which techniques to disrupt to break a likely chain.

How do you defend against Attack Flow?

Defences for Attack Flow typically combine technical controls and operational practices, as detailed in the full definition above.

What are other names for Attack Flow?

Common alternative names include: MITRE Attack Flow, Attack Flow Language.

Related terms