When a message containing an OpenPGP key attachment was displayed, Thunderbird automatically loaded the attachment's content to offer importing the key. A sender could mark the attachment as an external attachment pointing to an arbitrary URL, which Thunderbird then loaded without any user interaction, bypassing remote content blocking. On Windows, a URL pointing to an attacker-controlled network share could leak the user's NTLM credentials.
The NTLM credential leak only affects Thunderbird on Windows. On other operating systems, the issue allowed a remote request that bypassed remote content blocking. This vulnerability was fixed in Thunderbird 159 and Thunderbird 153.6.