Technical description:
Subsequent to the release of this bulletin, it was determined that this vulnerability could also affect users who do not have the “Outlook Today” folder home page as their default home page in Outlook 2002. As a result, Microsoft has re-released this bulletin with a new severity rating of “critical” to reflect the expanded attack vector. The update released with the original version of this security bulletin is effective in protecting from the vulnerability and users who have applied the update or have installed Office XP Service Pack 3 do not need to take additional action.
In addition, Microsoft is making available an additional “client update” for customers on the Microsoft Download Center. This additional update does not contain new fixes or functionality, but is instead an additional offering of the update that provides an alternative for customers. More information on the client update is available in the Security Update Information section.
A security vulnerability exists within Outlook 2002 that could allow Internet Explorer to execute script code in the Local Machine zone on an affected system. The parsing of specially crafted mailto URLs by Outlook 2002 causes this vulnerability. To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker would have to host a malicious Web site that contained a Web page designed to exploit the vulnerability and then persuade a user to view the Web page.
The attacker could also create an HTML e-mail message designed to exploit the vulnerability and persuade the user to view the HTML e-mail message. After the user has visited the malicious Web site or viewed the malicious HTML e-mail message an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could access files on a user's system or run arbitrary code on a user's system. This code would run in the security context of the currently logged-on user. Outlook 2002 is available as a separate product and is also included as part of Office XP.
Mitigating factors:
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Users who read e-mail messages in plain text format in are at less risk from the HTML e-mail attack vector as they would need to click on a link in an e-mail message to be affected.
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If an attacker exploited this vulnerability, the attacker would gain only the same privileges as the user. Users whose accounts are configured to have few privileges on the system would be at less risk than users who operate with administrative privileges.