Microsoft Security Response Center

Mitigation refers to a setting, common configuration, or general best-practice, existing in a default state, that could reduce the severity of exploitation of a vulnerability. The following mitigating factors might be helpful in your situation: The Windows message queuing service, which is a Windows component, needs to be enabled for a system to be exploitable by this vulnerability. This feature can be added via the Control Panel. You can check to see if there is a service running named **Message Queuing** and TCP port 1801 is listening on the machine.

**How could an attacker exploit this vulnerability?** In the case of a Remote Desktop connection, an attacker with control of a Remote Desktop Server could trigger a remote code execution (RCE) on the RDP client machine when a victim connects to the attacking server with the vulnerable Remote Desktop Client.

**What privileges could be gained by an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability?** An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges.

**According to the CVSS metric, the attack vector is local (AV:L). Why does the CVE title indicate that this is a remote code execution?** The word **Remote** in the title refers to the location of the attacker. This type of exploit is sometimes referred to as Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE). The attack itself is carried out locally. For example, when the score indicates that the **Attack Vector** is **Local** and **User Interaction** is **Required**, this could describe an exploit in which an attacker, through social engineering, convinces a victim to download and open a specially crafted file from a website which leads to a local attack on their computer.

**According to the CVSS metric, the attack complexity is high (AC:H). What does that mean for this vulnerability?** Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker to win a race condition.

**What privileges could be gained by an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability?** An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges.

**What privileges could be gained by an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability?** An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges.

**What privileges could be gained by an attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability?** An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain administrator privileges.

**According to the CVSS metric, the attack vector is local (AV:L). Why does the CVE title indicate that this is a remote code execution?** The word **Remote** in the title refers to the location of the attacker. This type of exploit is sometimes referred to as Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE). The attack itself is carried out locally. This means an attacker or victim needs to execute code from the local machine to exploit the vulnerability.

**According to the CVSS metric, the attack complexity is high (AC:H). What does that mean for this vulnerability?** Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker to take additional actions prior to exploitation to prepare the target environment.