Vendor: Microsoft
Vendor URL: https://www.microsoft.com/
Systems Affected: Microsoft Outlook
Author: Soroush Dalili
CVE Identifiers: https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-US/security-guidance/advisory/CVE-2017-8572, https://portal.msrc.microsoft.com/en-US/security-guidance/advisory/CVE-2017-11927
Risk: Medium – Possible SMB Hash Hijacking or User Tracking
Summary
Microsoft Outlook could be abused to send SMB handshakes externally after a victim opening or simply viewing an email. A WebDAV request was sent even when the SMB port was blocked. This could be used to crack a victim’s password when the SMB hash was sent externally, or to receive a notification when an email had been viewed by a victim.
This issue was exploited using Outlook default settings that blocked loading external resources such as image files.
Location
Emails that are received in Outlook can contain malicious HTML contents.
Impact
Attackers could obtain victims’ SMB hash to crack their password when the SMB hash was allowed to be sent externally (default setting). Alternatively, active email addresses could be enumerated as notification could be sent to attackers without victims’ consent when an email was viewed.
Details
A number of URI schemes and URI patterns were identified that could be used in a number of HTML tags to bypass restrictions of Outlook default settings that blocked the “” pattern URLs and loading external resources such as image files.
The following blog post include the details of the identified payloads:
Recommendation
Apply patches for CVE-2017-8572 (July 2017) and CVE-2017-11927 (May 2018).
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Written by: Soroush Dalili