That’s how 0days work

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Threat actors carried out zero-day attacks that targeted Windows users with malware for more than a year before Microsoft fixed the vulnerability that made them possible, researchers said Tuesday.

The vulnerability, present in both Windows 10 and 11, causes devices to open Internet Explorer, a legacy browser that Microsoft decommissioned in 2022 after its aging code base made it increasingly susceptible to exploits.

The company fixed the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-CVE-38112, on Tuesday as part of its monthly patch release program.

The link, however, incorporated two attributes—mhtml: and !x-usc:—an “old trick” threat actors have been using for years to cause Windows to open applications such as MS Word.

“From there (the website being opened with IE), the attacker could do many bad things because IE is insecure and outdated,” Haifei Li, the Check Point researcher who discovered the vulnerability, wrote.

“The second technique is an IE trick to make the victim believe they are opening a PDF file, while in fact, they are downloading and executing a dangerous .hta application.

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