Fortinet Discovers Microsoft Office Outlook Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
Summary
Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs has discovered a remote code execution vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook.
Microsoft Outlook is a personal information manager, which is a part of the Microsoft Office suite. Although it is used mainly as an email application, it also includes a calendar, task manager, contact manager, note taking, journal, and web browsing.
A remote code execution vulnerability is discovered in Microsoft Outlook due to its failure to properly handle objects in memory. When parsing a malformed RWZ file, an incorrect heap address free results in a heap corruption that eventually can lead to a remote code execution scenario. The vulnerability exists in the function OLMAPI32.dll!MAPIFreeBuffer, which is called by the function OLMAPI32.dll!FreePadrlist.
Solutions
FortiGuard Labs released the following FortiGate IPS signature which covers this specific vulnerability:MS.Outlook.CVE-2018-8524.Remote.Code.Execution
Released Oct 24, 2018
Users should apply the solution provided by Microsoft.
Timeline
Fortinet reported the vulnerability to Microsoft on August 31, 2018.
Microsoft confirmed the vulnerability on September 17, 2018.
Microsoft patched the vulnerability on November 13, 2018.