#microsoft

**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 and also to take additional actions prior to exploitation to prepare the target environment.

**According to the CVSS metric, privileges required is low (PR:L). What does that mean for this vulnerability?** Any authenticated attacker could trigger this vulnerability. It does not require admin or other elevated privileges.

**According to the CVSS metric, user interaction is required (UI:R). What interaction would the user have to do?** An attacker must send the user a malicious file and convince them to open it.

**What privileges could be gained by an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability?** An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges.

**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 take additional actions prior to exploitation to prepare the target environment.

**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.

**Is the Preview Pane an attack vector for this vulnerability?** Yes, the Preview Pane is an attack vector.

**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.

**According to the CVSS metric, user interaction is required (UI:R). What interaction would the user have to do?** Exploitation of the vulnerability requires that a user open a specially crafted file. * In an email attack scenario, an attacker could exploit the vulnerability by sending the specially crafted file to the user and convincing the user to open the file. * In a web-based attack scenario, an attacker could host a website (or leverage a compromised website that accepts or hosts user-provided content) containing a specially crafted file designed to exploit the vulnerability. An attacker would have no way to force users to visit the website. Instead, an attacker would have to convince users to click a link, typically by way of an enticement in an email or instant message, and then convince them to open the specially crafted file.

**According to the CVSS metric, the attack complexity is high (AC:H). What does that mean for this vulnerability?** The attacker must inject themselves into the logical network path between the target and the resource requested by the victim to read or modify network communications. This is called a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack.