atomic-red-team/atomics/T1164/T1164.md

T1164 - Re-opened Applications

Description from ATT&CK

Starting in Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), users can specify certain applications to be re-opened when a user reboots their machine. While this is usually done via a Graphical User Interface (GUI) on an app-by-app basis, there are property list files (plist) that contain this information as well located at ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist and ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.loginwindow.* .plist.

An adversary can modify one of these files directly to include a link to their malicious executable to provide a persistence mechanism each time the user reboots their machine (Citation: Methods of Mac Malware Persistence).

Atomic Tests

• Atomic Test #1 - Re-Opened Applications

• Atomic Test #2 - Re-Opened Applications

Atomic Test #1 - Re-Opened Applications

Plist Method

Reference

Supported Platforms: macOS

Run it with these steps!

1. create a custom plist:

   ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist

or

~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.loginwindow.*.plist

Atomic Test #2 - Re-Opened Applications

Mac Defaults

Reference

Supported Platforms: macOS

Inputs

Name	Description	Type	Default Value
script	path to script	path	/path/to/script

Run it with sh!

sudo defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook #{script}
sudo defaults delete com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook