CVE-2017-20190 — Some Microsoft technologies as used in Windows 8 through 11 allow a temporary cl

Some Microsoft technologies as used in Windows 8 through 11 allow a temporary client-side performance degradation during processing of multiple Unicode combining characters, aka a "Zalgo text" attack. NOTE: third parties dispute whether the computational cost of interpr

01What is this vulnerability?

Some Microsoft technologies as used in Windows 8 through 11 allow a temporary client-side performance degradation during processing of multiple Unicode combining characters, aka a "Zalgo text" attack. NOTE: third parties dispute whether the computational cost of interpreting Unicode data should be considered a vulnerability.

02Affected products

Vendor	Product	Versions
n	a / n/a	n/a

03Active exploitation status

Not currently listed on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. EPSS is the best forward-looking signal — see the EPSS row above.

04Recommended remediation

• Patch to a fixed version listed in the vendor advisory (see references below).
• Mitigate with WAF rules, network egress filters, or feature flags where the patch is not yet available.
• Hunt historical logs for exploitation indicators — see Detection signatures below.

05Technical details

For the full vendor write-up, exploit chains, and reference implementations, see the references list in section 09.

06Detection signatures

Ask SARA in chat to draft a starting detection for this CVE in your stack of choice.

07Related CVEs

No directly-cited follow-up CVEs in the KB record for this advisory. The references list in section 09 carries the vendor cross-references.

08Timeline

• Published: 2024-03-26T00:00:00.000Z
• Last modified: 2024-08-08T18:54:20.251Z

09References

• talk.dynalist.io — https://talk.dynalist.io/t/dynalist-is-vulnerable-to-zalgo/1234
• en.wikipedia.org — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zalgo_text
• aka.ms — https://aka.ms/windowsbugbar