I found an interesting blog post A Deep Analysis of the Microsoft Outlook Vulnerability CVE-2018-8587 about Microsoft Outlook heap buffer overflow vulnerability where is described how Microsoft Outlook can be exploited by using specially crafted mail classification rules file (RWZ).
To reproduce this vulnerability, we need to run Microsoft Outlook, then click "Rules => Manage Rules&Alerts => Options => Import Rules" and select the PoC file which causes Outlook to crash.
In the end they are writing:
Applying this patch is critical since an attacker who successfully exploits this vulnerability could use a specially crafted file to perform actions in the security context of the current user.
But how likely is that someone could exploit this vulnerability? I mean an attacker needs to send this malicious file to a user who needs to actively import this file which exploits this heap buffer overflow bug. It seems to me completely different from such attacks where an attacker sends a malicious PDF document which exploits some vulnerability in Adobe Reader. Here you need to actively hack yourself (similar to self-XSS in web security).
Even Microsoft states:
To exploit the vulnerability, a user must open a specially crafted file with an affected version of Microsoft Outlook software. 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) that contains a specially crafted file that is designed to exploit the vulnerability. However, an attacker would have no way to force the user to visit the website. Instead, an attacker would have to convince the user to click a link, typically by way of an enticement in an email or Instant Messenger message, and then convince the user to open the specially crafted file.
So this bug seems to be somewhat useless and very unlikely to exploit?