Zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft Office

Memory corruption
CVE-2013-3906

The meta date of the files were set to October 17, 2013, which may suggest a creation time of this exploit.

Attacks leveraging this zero-day exploit revealed that the Hangover group, believed to operate from India, has compromised 78 computers, 47 percent of those in Pakistan. The attacks observed are very limited and carefully carried out against selected computers, largely in the Middle East and South Asia.

Vulnerability details

Advisory: SB2013110501 - Remote code execution in Microsoft Graphics Component

Vulnerable component: Microsoft Office

CVE-ID: CVE-2013-3906

CVSSv3 score: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H/E:H/RL:O/RC:C

CWE-ID: CWE-119 - Memory corruption

Description:

The vulnerability allows a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on the target system.

The weakness exists due to boundary error when handling malicious images. A remote attacker can create specially crafted TIFF image file, trick the victim into opening it, trigger memory corruption and execute arbitrary code with privileges of the current user.

Successful exploitation of the vulnerability results in arbitrary code execution on the vulnerable system.

Note: the vulnerability was being actively exploited.

Known APT campaigns:

Operation Hangover

The main attacks were performed against Pakistan and are believed to have Indian origin.

In March, 2013 a Norway-based security firm Norman first created a report about the operation.

Public Exploits:

- Microsoft - Tagged Image File Format (TIFF) Integer Overflow (Metasploit) [Exploit-DB]

External links:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/2896666.aspx
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms13-096
https://securingtomorrow.mcafee.com/mcafee-labs/mcafee-labs-detects-zero-day-exploit-targeting-micro...
https://securingtomorrow.mcafee.com/business/security-connected/updates-and-mitigation-to-cve-2013-3...
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/srd/2013/11/05/cve-2013-3906-a-graphics-vulnerability-exploited-...
https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2013/11/the-dual-use-exploit-cve-2013-3906-used-in-both...
https://www.crowdstrike.com/blog/analysis-cve-2013-3906-exploit/
http://www.primalsecurity.net/analysis-of-malicious-document-using-cve-2013-3906/
http://blog.trendmicro.com/trendlabs-security-intelligence/how-to-avoid-the-latest-microsoft-office-...
http://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/19460/hacking/microsoft-cve-2013-3906-zero-day.html
https://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/if-sep-daily-definition-covers-exploit-cve-2013-3906

About zero-day vulnerabilities

Zero-day vulnerability is an undisclosed vulnerability in software that hackers can exploit to compromise computer programs, gain unauthorized access to sensitive data, penetrate networks, etc. We consider vulnerability a zero-day when there is no solution provided from software vendor and the vulnerability is being actively exploited by malicious actors.

Zero-day candidate is a potential zero-day vulnerability in software which might have been used in targeted attacks, however there is no evidence to support this suggestion.