Office Application Startup: Outlook Home Page T1137.004

Tactic: Persistence

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.

Events covered

3 catalog events are tagged with this technique by at least one rule.

Authoring guide

Patterns shared across the 1 rule above: which fields they filter on, what specific values they look for, and what they exclude. The catalog normalizes field names across vendors so Sigma's Image, Elastic's process.name, and Splunk's process_name collapse into one row. Each rule contributes at most once per row.

Fields filtered most (4 distinct)

The fields most rules look at when detecting this technique. The How column shows the operators authors use (eq, wildcard, regex_match, match) and how often each appears. Sample values are concrete examples to start from, not an exhaustive list.

FieldRulesHowSample values
Details1wildcard 1*://*, *:\*, \\*\*
EventType1ne 1deletion
TargetObject1wildcard 1*\software\microsoft\office\*\outlook\today\*, *\software\microsoft\office\*\outlook\webview\*
registry_value_name1eq 1URL

Top indicator values (7 distinct)

Specific (field, operator, value) combinations the rules check for, ranked by how many rules under this technique use each one. The Corpus reach column counts how many rules across the entire catalog (any technique) check the same combination. High numbers point to widely-used indicators that are likely noisy on their own; combine them with another condition for useful signal. Blank means the combination is specific to rules under this technique. Click a value to expand the rules under this technique that use it.

FieldKindValueRules (here)Corpus reach
Detailswildcard
*://*
1
Detailswildcard
*:\*
1
Detailswildcard
\\*\*
1
EventTypene
deletion
111
TargetObjectwildcard
*\software\microsoft\office\*\outlook\today\*
1
TargetObjectwildcard
*\software\microsoft\office\*\outlook\webview\*
1
registry_value_nameeq
URL
12

Rules under this technique

Every rule in the catalog tagged with this technique, grouped by vendor. Click a rule title for its full predicates, exclusions, and indicators.

Platform (all)
Domain (all)

Elastic 1 rule