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MITRE ATT&CK® Mitigation

T1221: Template Injection Mitigation

Consider disabling Microsoft Office macros/active content to prevent the execution of malicious payloads in documents [1], though this setting may not mitigate the Forced Authentication use for this technique.

Because this technique involves user interaction on the endpoint, it's difficult to fully mitigate. However, there are potential mitigations including training users to identify social engineering techniques and spearphishing emails. Network/Host intrusion prevention systems, antivirus, and detonation chambers can be employed to prevent documents from fetching and/or executing malicious payloads. [2]

EnterpriseT1221MitigationObject 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

Glexia publishes ATT&CK takes only after source-hash and schema validation. Until then, use the official MITRE definition below and the defensive relationship context on this page.

Official MITRE ATT&CK definition

Template Injection Mitigation

Consider disabling Microsoft Office macros/active content to prevent the execution of malicious payloads in documents [1], though this setting may not mitigate the Forced Authentication use for this technique.

Because this technique involves user interaction on the endpoint, it's difficult to fully mitigate. However, there are potential mitigations including training users to identify social engineering techniques and spearphishing emails. Network/Host intrusion prevention systems, antivirus, and detonation chambers can be employed to prevent documents from fetching and/or executing malicious payloads. [2]

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

All related ATT&CK context

No relationships are available in the current normalized data for this object.

Change history

Object version and sync metadata

The fields below describe the current mirrored snapshot. When Glexia retains multiple ATT&CK source imports, you can open the table to compare the same object across releases (hashes and MITRE timestamps). For MITRE’s own release notes and roadmap, see ATT&CK resources — Updates .

ATT&CK release
19.1
Object version
1.0
Created
Modified
Raw hash
d004b95d2d467305...
Imported snapshots across ATT&CK releases (1)
Release Bundle imported Object version Modified Status Raw hash
19.1 1.0 Current bundle Deprecated d004b95d2d46…
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

MITRE external references are preserved separately from Glexia analysis so citations remain traceable to their original source records.

  1. [1]
    Microsoft Disable Macros

    Microsoft. (n.d.). Enable or disable macros in Office files. Retrieved September 13, 2018.

    Open source URL
  2. [2]
    Anomali Template Injection MAR 2018

    Intel_Acquisition_Team. (2018, March 1). Credential Harvesting and Malicious File Delivery using Microsoft Office Template Injection. Retrieved July 20, 2018.

    Open source URL
  3. [3]
    mitre-attack T1221
    Open source URL
Source and licensing

Source: MITRE ATT&CK®. © 2026 The MITRE Corporation. This work is reproduced and distributed with the permission of The MITRE Corporation. MITRE ATT&CK and ATT&CK are registered trademarks of The MITRE Corporation. Glexia is not affiliated with or endorsed by MITRE.