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MITRE ATT&CK® Mitigation

T1193: Spearphishing Attachment Mitigation

Network intrusion prevention systems and systems designed to scan and remove malicious email attachments can be used to block activity. Solutions can be signature and behavior based, but adversaries may construct attachments in a way to avoid these systems.

Block unknown or unused attachments by default that should not be transmitted over email as a best practice to prevent some vectors, such as .scr, .exe, .pif, .cpl, etc. Some email scanning devices can open and analyze compressed and encrypted formats, such as zip and rar that may be used to conceal malicious attachments in Obfuscated Files or Information.

Because this technique involves user interaction on the endpoint, it's difficult to fully mitigate. However, there are potential mitigations. Users can be trained to identify social engineering techniques and spearphishing emails. To prevent the attachments from executing, application whitelisting can be used. Anti-virus can also automatically quarantine suspicious files.

EnterpriseT1193MitigationObject v1.0 Modified
Historical object

This ATT&CK object is revoked or deprecated in the current MITRE ATT&CK release.

It remains available for historical context and inbound links. Use current ATT&CK relationships and replacement guidance before basing detection or reporting work on this page.

Glexia's Take

Analyst summary pending validation

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Official MITRE ATT&CK definition

Spearphishing Attachment Mitigation

Network intrusion prevention systems and systems designed to scan and remove malicious email attachments can be used to block activity. Solutions can be signature and behavior based, but adversaries may construct attachments in a way to avoid these systems.

Block unknown or unused attachments by default that should not be transmitted over email as a best practice to prevent some vectors, such as .scr, .exe, .pif, .cpl, etc. Some email scanning devices can open and analyze compressed and encrypted formats, such as zip and rar that may be used to conceal malicious attachments in Obfuscated Files or Information.

Because this technique involves user interaction on the endpoint, it's difficult to fully mitigate. However, there are potential mitigations. Users can be trained to identify social engineering techniques and spearphishing emails. To prevent the attachments from executing, application whitelisting can be used. Anti-virus can also automatically quarantine suspicious files.

View the same entry on attack.mitre.org (MITRE-hosted reference; in-page links above use the Glexia ATT&CK library.)

Glexia analysis

How security teams should use this page

Treat this object as behavior context, not an attribution claim. Validate the related groups, software, data sources, and mitigations against official ATT&CK relationships and your own telemetry before making control-coverage decisions.

Relationship explorer

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Change history

Object version and sync metadata

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ATT&CK release
19.1
Object version
1.0
Created
Modified
Raw hash
57472bc60cc0628a...
Imported snapshots across ATT&CK releases (1)
Release Bundle imported Object version Modified Status Raw hash
19.1 1.0 Current bundle Deprecated 57472bc60cc0…
Raw source

Mirrored ATT&CK source object

The raw object is retained through the mirrored ATT&CK source bundle and object hash. The raw endpoint returns the exact object from the mirrored bundle when available.

Source references

External references and citations

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  1. [1]
    mitre-attack T1193
    Open source URL
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