There are a number of methods which use macros in Office documents to deploy malware.  I came across one the other day that leverages a vulnerability in various versions of the .NET Framework.  

CVE 2017-8759 -- Microsoft .NET Framework versions allow an attacker to execute code remotely via a malicious document or application, aka ".NET Framework Remote Code Execution Vulnerability."

There are three pieces to this exploit -- the Word document, a text file which will get downloaded when the macros are enabled, and .hta file with a payload.  With a patched machine and current antivirus, I attempted to get this working but I could never get proper execution for whatever reason.

My original intention was to provide an example of automating Local File Inclusion (LFI) which I'd done previously somewhere on this site using Python.  But the point of that post was LFI with Python, not to answer a question someone posed to me in a discussion.  Now that I think about it, I wonder if the problems I encountered with this exercise would have also been encountered with a Python script.  Hold that thought, I'll work that out in a moment.

Before I digress too much, this post is about automating LFI with Bash but then things got sideways and I thought I'd write about it.  

If there's one big takeaway from hacking, I'd say it's this -- what we do is not the intended method for interacting with the application (or interacting with whatever) and we should expect inconsistent results.  That was my mistake here.

I went hunting for vulnerable PHP code to use as an example and my first acquisition was a collection of scripts that wouldn't function correctly.  It had several different pieces, all supposedly vulnerable, but only one of the pieces actually worked.  In my second attempt at finding vulnerable code, I came across WackoPicko.  According to the description:

"WackoPicko is a website that contains known vulnerabilities. It was first used for the paper Why Johnny Can't Pentest: An Analysis of Black-box Web Vulnerability Scanners"

In the end, I didn't get exactly what I wanted and my frustration with "free" code not performing up to my level of expectation lead me down a path which is equally amusing.