Microsoft Internet Explorer 6

[Mobo]

http-equiv has discovered two vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system, link to local resources, conduct cross-site scripting and bypass a security feature in Microsoft Windows XP SP2.

1) Insufficient validation of drag and drop events from the "Internet" zone to local resources for valid images or media files with embedded HTML code. This can be exploited by e.g. a malicious web site to plant arbitrary HTML documents on a user's system, which may allow execution of arbitrary script code in the "Local Computer" zone.

This vulnerability is a variant of:
SA12321

NOTE: Microsoft Windows XP SP2 does not allow Active Scripting in the "Local Computer" zone.

2) A security site / zone restriction error, where an embedded HTML Help control on e.g. a malicious web site references a specially crafted index (.hhk) file, can execute local HTML documents or inject arbitrary script code in context of a previous loaded document using a malicious javascript URI handler.

Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary HTML and script code in a user's browser session in context of arbitrary sites, or execution of local programs with parameters from the "Local Computer" zone using a HTML Help shortcut.

NOTE: This will also bypass the "Local Computer" zone lockdown security feature in SP2.

It is also possible to execute local HTML documents using the "Related Topics" command of the HTML Help control.

The two vulnerabilities in combination with an inappropriate behaviour where the ActiveX Data Object (ADO) model can write arbitrary files can be exploited to compromise a user's system. This has been confirmed on a fully patched system with Internet Explorer 6.0 and Microsoft Windows XP SP2.

Solution:
1) The vendor recommends that the "Drag and drop or copy and paste files" option is disabled.
2) Set security level to high for the "Internet" zone.