Microsoft Outlook Warning: Critical New Email Exploit Triggers Automatically | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Outlook Warning: Critical New Email Exploit Triggers Automatically

forbes.com

28 pointsbjoko11 comments

"Google-owned threat intelligence company, Mandiant, says that it believes the CVE-2023-23397 Microsoft Outlook zero-day vulnerability has been exploited for nearly a year in order to target both organizations and critical infrastructure."

Nearly a year, very nice. Adding to the list of reasons why I hate outlook.

Should we kill Outlook and use web based O365 until a patch is released?

O365 web based mail has been pretty good for a while now compared with Outlook if you're in the MS ecosystem. I might just make the switch now and see how I get on.

Personally I agree with this with the addition of O365 and we go back to text only email :)

But unfortunately, doing that would cause lots of issues for many Companies and Marketers. IBM Notes is still being sold by a company in India, I wonder if that could be an alternative. I doubt there are any/many security issues with that due to how hard it is to setup.

> But unfortunately, doing that would cause lots of issues for many Companies and Marketers.

What’s the unfortunate part in that?

For the users, users I support cannot function unless all applications are pointy/click. That goes for some programmers I know too :(

Article said a patch was released tuesday

You’ll be fine. I got a new MacBook in late 2019. I never installed the Outlook client and use my work mail exclusively via O365 client and my phone. I’ve never felt like I wanted to install the client.

Ironically, there's been a lot of angst because Microsoft keeps hinting that the future of the Outlook Desktop client is just a React Native version of the web app with just enough backward compatibility guts to support a lot of old extensions so that Big Enterprise customers don't filet them for breaking weird old workflows.

Which is to say that even Microsoft seems to be acting and hinting like the web app is better than Outlook Desktop and Outlook Desktop's days are numbered, it mostly exists as a legacy platform for weird Enterprise things.

A switch now might actually be a leg up to the rumored "One Outlook".

If I’m reading the CVE correctly, this could be used for privilege escalation?

It is privilege escalation. Used in NTLM relay attacks.

TLDR: "Alternatively, you can block outbound TCP 445/SMB using a firewall or through VPN settings."

Simple and easy: don't allow TCP 445 outside your LAN

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