[Full-disclosure] DLL hijacking with Autorun on a USB drive

[paul.szabo at sydney.edu.au]

Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:

>> Instead of it executing "wab.exe (Windows Address Book) and open the file
>> test.vcf", one can directly get any .exe file open.
>
> The whole point is that launching wab.exe and opening a test file is relatively
> innocuous - but if you can do that, you're basically holding the user's
> testicles in one hand and a very sharp knife in the other. It *could* have been
> anything - but we'll just do something mostly harmless just to be nice.

I thought that the point is that the victim does not invoke wab.exe
directly, but simply double-clicks on the innocent VCF file.

The attacker provides an innocent (and innocent-looking) VCF or similar
file, and places some DLLs in the same folder (or in some cases in a
lower-level folder). The unsafe application foolishly looks for its DLLs
in (or under) the current dir.

Cheers, Paul

Paul Szabo   psz at maths.usyd.edu.au   http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/u/psz/
School of Mathematics and Statistics   University of Sydney    Australia