Tag Archives: Outlook

About Remote Code Execution – Windows OLE (CVE-2025-21298) vulnerability

About Remote Code Execution - Windows OLE (CVE-2025-21298) vulnerability

About Remote Code Execution – Windows OLE (CVE-2025-21298) vulnerability. The vulnerability is from the January Microsoft Patch Tuesday. OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) is a technology for linking and embedding objects into other documents and objects, developed by Microsoft. A common use of this technology is embedding an Excel table in a Word document.

What is this vulnerability about? The attacker’s code executes when a specially crafted RTF document is opened or when a malicious email is opened or previewed in Microsoft Outlook. In the second case, no action is required from the victim other than clicking on the message. 🤷‍♂️ Microsoft recommends viewing messages in Outlook only in plain text.

On January 20, an exploit PoC appeared on GitHub that demonstrates Memory Corruption when opening an RTF document. Now we are waiting for an RCE exploit for Outlook. 😉

There have been no reports of attacks yet.

Fix this vulnerability ASAP!

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I have finalized the list of trending vulnerabilities for 2024 according to Positive Technologies

I have finalized the list of trending vulnerabilities for 2024 according to Positive Technologies

I have finalized the list of trending vulnerabilities for 2024 according to Positive Technologies. Last year, 74 vulnerabilities were classified as trending (to compare the scale, just over 40,000 were added to NVD in 2024).

All trending vulnerabilities are found in Western commercial products and open source projects. This year, the vulnerabilities of domestic Russian products did not reach the level of criticality required to classify them as trending.

For 55 of all trending vulnerabilities there are currently signs of exploitation in attacks, for 17 there are public exploits (but no signs of exploitation) and for the remaining 2 there is only a possibility of future exploitation.

Vulnerabilities were often added to trending ones before signs of exploitation in the wild appeared. For example, the remote code execution vulnerability in VMware vCenter (CVE-2024-38812) was added to the list of trending vulnerabilities on September 20, 3 days after the vendor’s security bulletin appeared. There were no signs of exploitation in the wild or public exploit for this vulnerability. Signs of exploitation appeared only 2 months later, on November 18.

Most of the vulnerabilities in the trending list are of the following types: Remote Code or Command Execution (24) and Elevation of Privilege (21).

4 vulnerabilities in Barracuda Email Security Gateway (CVE-2023-2868), MOVEit Transfer (CVE-2023-34362), papercut (CVE-2023-27350) and SugarCRM (CVE-2023-22952) were added in early January 2024. These vulnerabilities were massively exploited in the West in 2023, and attacks using these vulnerabilities could also tangentially affect those domestic Russian organizations where these products had not yet been taken out of service. The rest of the vulnerabilities became trending in 2024.

34 trending vulnerabilities affect Microsoft products (45%).

🔹 17 of them are Elevation of Privilege vulnerabilities in the Windows kernel and standard components.

🔹 1 Remote Code Execution vulnerability in Windows Remote Desktop Licensing Service (CVE-2024-38077).

2 trending Elevation of Privilege vulnerabilities affect Linux systems: one in nftables (CVE-2024-1086), and the second in needrestart (CVE-2024-48990).

Other groups of vulnerabilities

🔻 Phishing attacks: 19 (Windows components, Outlook, Exchange, Ghostscript, Roundcube)
🔻 Network security and entry points: 13 (Palo Alto, Fortinet, Juniper, Ivanti, Check Point, Zyxel)
🔻 Virtual infrastructure and backups: 7 (VMware, Veeam, Acronis)
🔻 Software development: 6 (GitLab, TeamCity, Jenkins, PHP, Fluent Bit, Apache Struts)
🔻 Collaboration tools: 3 (Atlassian Confluence, XWiki)
🔻 CMS WordPress plugins: 3 (LiteSpeed Cache, The Events Calendar, Hunk Companion)

🗒 Full Vulristics report

🟥 Article on the official website “Vulnerable software and hardware vs. security researchers” (rus)

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June Microsoft Patch Tuesday

June Microsoft Patch Tuesday

June Microsoft Patch Tuesday. There are 69 vulnerabilities in total, 18 of which were added between May and June Patch Tuesday. Among these added were 2 vulnerabilities with signs of exploitation in the wild:

🔻 Remote Code Execution – Chromium (CVE-2024-5274, CVE-2024-4947). Both vulnerabilities are in CISA KEV; there are no exploits for them yet.

For the remaining vulnerabilities, there are no formal signs of exploitation in the wild or public exploits yet.

The specialized InfoSec media pay attention to these 2:

🔸 Remote Code Execution – Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) (CVE-2024-30080). This vulnerability has a high CVSS Score of 9.8. To get RCE, the attacker sends a specially crafted malicious packet to the MSMQ server. The vulnerability may well become wormable for Windows servers with MSMQ enabled. It is very similar to last year’s QueueJumper (CVE-2023-21554).
🔸 Denial of Service – DNSSEC (CVE-2023-50868). Vulnerability in DNSSEC validation. An attacker can cause DoS using standard DNS integrity protocols. 🤷‍♂️ I don’t see any super criticality, but this is rare for MS Patch Tuesday, which is probably why everyone is writing about it.

What else you can pay attention to:

🔸 Elevation of Privilege – Windows Win32k (CVE-2024-30091), Windows Kernel (CVE-2024-30088, CVE-2024-30099) and Windows Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver (CVE-2024-30085). Why these? Microsoft’s CVSS states that there are private Proof-of-Concept exploits for them.
🔸 Remote Code Execution – Microsoft Office (CVE-2024-30101). This is a Microsoft Outlook vulnerability. To successfully exploit this vulnerability, a user must open a malicious email in an affected version of Microsoft Outlook and then perform certain actions to trigger the vulnerability. It’s enough to open the email in the Preview Pane. However, to successfully exploit this vulnerability, an attacker needs to win the race condition.
🔸 Remote Code Execution – Microsoft Outlook (CVE-2024-30103). Preview Pane is a vector. Authentication required. The vulnerability is somehow related to the creation of malicious DLL files. 🤷‍♂️
🔸 Remote Code Execution – Windows Wi-Fi Driver (CVE-2024-30078). An attacker can execute code on a vulnerable system by sending a specially crafted network packet. The victim must be within the attacker’s Wi-Fi range and use a Wi-Fi adapter. Sounds interesting, let’s wait for details. 😈
🔸 Remote Code Execution – Microsoft Office (CVE-2024-30104). An attacker must send the user a malicious file and convince the user to open the file. The Preview Pane is NOT an attack vector.

🗒 Vulristics report on June Microsoft Patch Tuesday

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First impressions of the April Microsoft Patch Tuesday

First impressions of the April Microsoft Patch Tuesday
First impressions of the April Microsoft Patch TuesdayFirst impressions of the April Microsoft Patch TuesdayFirst impressions of the April Microsoft Patch TuesdayFirst impressions of the April Microsoft Patch TuesdayFirst impressions of the April Microsoft Patch TuesdayFirst impressions of the April Microsoft Patch TuesdayFirst impressions of the April Microsoft Patch TuesdayFirst impressions of the April Microsoft Patch TuesdayFirst impressions of the April Microsoft Patch Tuesday

First impressions of the April Microsoft Patch Tuesday. I don’t even know what to write. 🤪 Very strange! 173 vulnerabilities, of which 23 were added since the last Patch Tuesday.

Microsoft flags one vulnerability as being exploited in the wild: Spoofing – Proxy Driver (CVE-2024-26234). And only Qualys briefly mentions it. Literally like this: “Microsoft has not disclosed any information about the vulnerability”. 😅 ZDI also claims that Security Feature Bypass – SmartScreen Prompt (CVE-2024-29988) is being exploited in the wild, which is a Mark of the Web (MotW) bypass.

There are no exploits for anything yet. The following vulnerabilities can be highlighted:

🔸 Remote Code Execution – Microsoft Excel (CVE-2024-26257). Can be exploited by an attacker when the victim opens a specially crafted file.
🔸 Remote Code Execution – RPC (CVE-2024-20678). It is highlighted by ZDI, which also claims 1.3 million exposed TCP 135 ports.
🔸 Spoofing – Outlook for Windows (CVE-2024-20670). ZDI writes that this is an Information Disclosure vulnerability that can be used in NTLM relay attacks.
🔸 Remote Code Execution – Windows DNS Server (CVE-2024-26221, CVE-2024-26222, CVE-2024-26223, CVE-2024-26224, CVE-2024-26227, CVE-2024-26231, CVE-2024-26233). Maybe some of this will be exploited in the wild, ZDI particularly highlights CVE-2024-26221.
🔸 Remote Code Execution – Microsoft Defender for IoT (CVE-2024-21322, CVE-2024-21323, CVE-2024-29053). It is an IoT and ICS/OT security solution that can be deployed on-prem.

There are simply indecently massive fixes:

🔹 Remote Code Execution – Microsoft OLE DB Driver for SQL Server / Microsoft WDAC OLE DB Provider for SQL Server / Microsoft WDAC SQL Server ODBC Driver. 28 CVEs! I won’t even list everything here. 😨
🔹 Security Feature Bypass – Secure Boot. 23 CVEs!

🗒 Vulristics report

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Upd. 10.04 I slightly tweaked the vulnerability type detection to increase the priority of the detection based on the Microsoft generated description compared to the detection based on CWE. In particular, the type of vulnerability for Spoofing – Proxy Driver (CVE-2024-26234) and Spoofing – Outlook for Windows (CVE-2024-20670) has changed.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday July 2023: Vulristics improvements, Office RCE, SFB SmartScreen and Outlook, EoP MSHTML and ERS, other RCEs

Microsoft Patch Tuesday July 2023: Vulristics improvements, Office RCE, SFB SmartScreen and Outlook, EoP MSHTML and ERS, other RCEs. Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for July 2023, including vulnerabilities that were added between June and July Patch Tuesdays.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239131

As usual, I use my open source Vulristics project to analyse and prioritize vulnerabilities.

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday March 2023: Outlook EoP, MOTW Bypass, Excel DoS, HTTP/3 RCE, ICMP RCE, RPC RCE

Microsoft Patch Tuesday March 2023: Outlook EoP, MOTW Bypass, Excel DoS, HTTP/3 RCE, ICMP RCE, RPC RCE. Hello everyone! This episode will be about Microsoft Patch Tuesday for March 2023, including vulnerabilities that were added between February and March Patch Tuesdays.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239119

As usual, I use my open source Vulristics project to analyse and prioritize vulnerabilities. I took the comments about the vulnerabilities from the Qualys, Tenable, Rapid7, ZDI Patch Tuesday reviews.

Microsoft Patch Tuesday for March 2023 was quite refreshing. 😈

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Microsoft Patch Tuesday August 2022: DogWalk, Exchange EOPs, 13 potentially dangerous, 2 funny, 3 mysterious vulnerabilities

Microsoft Patch Tuesday August 2022: DogWalk, Exchange EOPs, 13 potentially dangerous, 2 funny, 3 mysterious vulnerabilities. Hello everyone! In this episode, let’s take a look at the Microsoft Patch Tuesday August 2022 vulnerabilities. I use my Vulristics vulnerability prioritization tool as usual. I take comments for vulnerabilities from Tenable, Qualys, Rapid7, ZDI and Kaspersky blog posts. Also, as usual, I take into account the vulnerabilities added between the July and August Patch Tuesdays.

Alternative video link (for Russia): https://vk.com/video-149273431_456239098

There were 147 vulnerabilities. Urgent: 1, Critical: 0, High: 36, Medium: 108, Low: 2.

There was a lot of great stuff this Patch Tuesday. There was a critical exploited in the wild MSDT DogWalk vulnerability, 3 critical Exchange vulnerabilities that could be easily missed in prioritization, 13 potentially dangerous vulnerabilities, 2 funny vulnerabilities and 3 mysterious ones. Let’s take a closer look.

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