T1164 - Re-opened Applications

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).