Microsoft Security Response Center

**What is the nature of the spoofing?** An attacker could appear as a trusted user when they should not be. This could cause a user to mistakenly trust a signed email message as if it came from a legitimate user.

**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 an attacker gain?** An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges.

**Is the Preview Pane an attack vector for this vulnerability?** No, the Preview Pane is not an attack vector.

**Is the Preview Pane an attack vector for this vulnerability?** No, the Preview Pane is not an attack vector.

**Why are there two different impacts in the Security Updates table?** An attacker could potentially exploit this vulnerability to elevate privileges from a client-side application sandbox in earlier Microsoft operating systems. However, mitigation technologies in later Microsoft operating systems make this more difficult. For this reason, this vulnerability has two different impact ratings.

**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. The vulnerable endpoint is only available over the local VM interface as all external communication is blocked. This means an attacker needs to execute code from the local machine to exploit the vulnerability.

**How could an attacker exploit this vulnerability?** A locally authenticated attacker could manipulate information on the Sysinternals services to achieve elevation from local user to SYSTEM admin.

**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.

**What type of information could be disclosed by this vulnerability?** Exploiting this vulnerability could allow the disclosure of initialized or uninitialized memory in the process heap.