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.