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Application & OT Security · Intermediate

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)

MITRE's catalog of common attack patterns describing how adversaries exploit known weaknesses.

Definition

CAPEC entries describe attack prerequisites, execution flow, required skills and mitigations, and link to related CWE weaknesses. It is application-security focused, while ATT&CK focuses on post-compromise adversary behavior in networks. Threat modelers use CAPEC to enumerate realistic attacks against a design.

Example

CAPEC-66 describes SQL injection as an attack pattern that exploits CWE-89.

Exam tip

CAPEC = attack patterns, CWE = weaknesses, CVE = specific vulnerabilities, ATT&CK = adversary tactics and techniques.

Related terms