08 Jun / 2022
Cyber Security
What Is Vulnerable?
Windows Office 2013 and later, including the latest patches for Office 2021
What’s Happening?
Microsoft Office is the latest victim to a remote code execution vulnerability which was publicly disclosed by Microsoft on the 31st of May. Nicknamed Follina, this vulnerability is actively being used against Australian organisations by threat actors, according to the ACSC.
How It Works
This vulnerability harnesses Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT) and a malicious URL baked into a word document. When the URL is clicked HTML will download from a webserver and execute arbitrary PowerShell code using the ms-msdt protocol. There are 3 key factors that cause Follina to be troubling to security researchers.
As of the 1st of June, there are no official patches available for vulnerable versions of Office products. There is however a simple fix to remediate against this in the interim. The MSDT URI can be disabled via a registry edit in CMD or Group Policy.
Cythera continues to monitor all managed clients and detection capabilities we have in place will likely detect any post-exploitation activities related to this vulnerability.
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