The Patching Friars' AlmanacA calendar of CVE saints

December 15

BadWinmailHoly card for badwinmail, generated with AI (Claude, Anthropic) for the Lunario dei Frati Patchatori.CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 winmail.dat BadWinmail APERIRE SAT EST
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Saint BadWinmail, Whom You Only Had to Open

Patron of people who read mail in the preview pane, winmail.dat files, and OLE objects invited without an invitation.

Life

In December 2015 the researcher Haifei Li described BadWinmail: an email in TNEF format, Outlook's infamous winmail.dat, could carry an OLE object that was rendered automatically. Packing a Flash exploit inside it, the victim only had to open or preview the message for the code to run inside outlook.exe, which lacks Office's sandbox. Microsoft fixed it as CVE-2015-6172.

Prayer

O Saint BadWinmail, who arrives as an attachment and renders yourself, let our mail show text and run no objects. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by installing the December 2015 Office update and distrusting every winmail.dat you can't quite open.

An email opened in preview brings the surprise home already.

Technical record

Disclosed on
December 15 2015
CVE
CVE-2015-6172

Microsoft Word 2007 SP3, Office 2010 SP2, Word 2010 SP2, Word 2013 SP1, Word 2016, Word 2013 RT SP1, and Office Compatibility Pack SP3 allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted email message processed by Outlook, aka "Microsoft Office RCE Vulnerability."

Sources: sites.google.com · 0b3dcaf9-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com · youtube.com

Also remembered today

Shortcuts: ← → to move, D day, W week, M month, T today.

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SaintsGoogle CalendarApple, Outlook (.ics)

Observances (feasts, scourges and miracles)Google CalendarApple, Outlook (.ics)

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