CVE-2017-0199 exploiting and preventing – guest blog

Phishing scams tricking unsuspecting users into opening nefarious files are nothing new, and attackers have using weaponized documents for just about as long. This week, I had the pleasure of being featured on Milton Security’s blog to talk about a new attack that was spotted as early as last year, and was finally patched by Microsoft in April. I went over this CVE-2017-0199 vulnerability that affected Windows based machines using Microsoft Word and the default built-in Wordpad, that enabled an attacker to send a malicious RTF file that would execute a HTA file remotely without any user interaction besides opening the file. I went over how to create the file using Metasploit, a python script, and finally just using Microsoft Word itself and editing the file to make it autorun. Spear-phishing attacks could allow the attacker to send these files to their victims over a spoofed in email and gain a foothold into the victim’s network if they weren’t properly patched which the article also covered towards the end on how to mitigate. So head over there and check it out. https://www.miltonsecurity.com/company/blog/analysis-cve-2017-0199-ms-word-threats-are-back