T1137.004 Outlook Home Page
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
Item | Value |
---|---|
ID | T1137.004 |
Sub-techniques | T1137.001, T1137.002, T1137.003, T1137.004, T1137.005, T1137.006 |
Tactics | TA0003 |
Platforms | Office 365, Windows |
Permissions required | Administrator, User |
Version | 1.1 |
Created | 07 November 2019 |
Last Modified | 16 August 2021 |
Procedure Examples
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.7 |
S0358 | Ruler | Ruler can be used to automate the abuse of Outlook Home Pages to establish persistence.6 |
Mitigations
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 |
Detection
ID | Data Source | Data Component |
---|---|---|
DS0015 | Application Log | Application Log Content |
DS0017 | Command | Command Execution |
DS0009 | Process | Process Creation |
References
-
Stalmans, E. (2017, October 11). Outlook Home Page – Another Ruler Vector. Retrieved February 4, 2019. ↩↩↩
-
Fox, C., Vangel, D. (2018, April 22). Detect and Remediate Outlook Rules and Custom Forms Injections Attacks in Office 365. Retrieved February 4, 2019. ↩
-
SensePost. (2017, September 21). NotRuler - The opposite of Ruler, provides blue teams with the ability to detect Ruler usage against Exchange. Retrieved February 4, 2019. ↩
-
Microsoft. (2021, July 2). Use attack surface reduction rules to prevent malware infection. Retrieved June 24, 2021. ↩
-
Stalmans, E. (2017, April 28). Outlook Forms and Shells. Retrieved February 4, 2019. ↩
-
SensePost. (2016, August 18). Ruler: A tool to abuse Exchange services. Retrieved February 4, 2019. ↩
-
McWhirt, M., Carr, N., Bienstock, D. (2019, December 4). Breaking the Rules: A Tough Outlook for Home Page Attacks (CVE-2017-11774). Retrieved June 23, 2020. ↩