📚 Crashing explorer.exe with(out) a click, (Mon, Mar 30th)

In a couple of my recent diaries, we discussed two small unpatched vulnerabilities/weaknesses in Windows. One, which allowed us to brute-force contents of folders without any permissions[1], and another, which enabled us to change names of files and folders without actually renaming them[2]. Today, we'll add another vulnerability/weakness to the collection – this one will allow us to cause a temporary DoS condition for the Explorer process (i.e. we will crash it) and/or for other processes. It is interesting since all that is required for it to work is that a user opens a link or visits a folder with a specially crafted file.