| ID | Name |
|---|---|
| T1137.001 | Office Template Macros |
| T1137.002 | Office Test |
| T1137.003 | Outlook Forms |
| T1137.004 | Outlook Home Page |
| T1137.005 | Outlook Rules |
| T1137.006 | Add-ins |
Adversaries may abuse Microsoft Outlook's Home Page feature to obtain persistence on a compromised system. Outlook Home Page is a legacy feature used to customize the presentation of Outlook folders. This feature allows for an internal or external URL to be loaded and presented whenever a folder is opened. A malicious HTML page can be crafted that will execute code when loaded by Outlook Home Page.[1]
Once malicious home pages have been added to the user’s mailbox, they will be loaded when Outlook is started. Malicious Home Pages will execute when the right Outlook folder is loaded/reloaded.[1]
| ID | Name | Description |
|---|---|---|
| G0049 | OilRig |
OilRig has abused the Outlook Home Page feature for persistence. OilRig has also used CVE-2017-11774 to roll back the initial patch designed to protect against Home Page abuse.[2] |
| S0358 | Ruler |
Ruler can be used to automate the abuse of Outlook Home Pages to establish persistence.[3] |
| ID | Mitigation | Description |
|---|---|---|
| M1040 | Behavior Prevention on Endpoint |
On Windows 10, enable Attack Surface Reduction (ASR) rules to prevent Office applications from creating child processes and from writing potentially malicious executable content to disk. [4] |
| M1051 | Update Software |
For the Outlook methods, blocking macros may be ineffective as the Visual Basic engine used for these features is separate from the macro scripting engine.[5] Microsoft has released patches to try to address each issue. Ensure KB3191938 which blocks Outlook Visual Basic and displays a malicious code warning, KB4011091 which disables custom forms by default, and KB4011162 which removes the legacy Home Page feature, are applied to systems.[1] |
| ID | Data Source | Data Component |
|---|---|---|
| DS0015 | Application Log | Application Log Content |
| DS0017 | Command | Command Execution |
| DS0009 | Process | Process Creation |
Microsoft has released a PowerShell script to safely gather mail forwarding rules and custom forms in your mail environment as well as steps to interpret the output.[6] SensePost, whose tool Ruler can be used to carry out malicious rules, forms, and Home Page attacks, has released a tool to detect Ruler usage.[7]
Collect process execution information including process IDs (PID) and parent process IDs (PPID) and look for abnormal chains of activity resulting from Office processes. Non-standard process execution trees may also indicate suspicious or malicious behavior.