Some vulnerabilities have been discovered in Internet Explorer, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system, conduct cross-site/zone 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 bypass the "Local Computer" zone lockdown security feature in SP2.

3) A security site / zone restriction error in the handling of the "Related Topics" command in an embedded HTML Help control can be exploited by e.g. a malicious website to execute arbitrary script code in the context of arbitrary sites or zones.

NOTE: This may be exploited to bypass the "Local Computer" zone lockdown security feature in SP2.

Secunia has constructed a test, which can be used to check if your browser is affected by this issue:
http://secunia.com/internet_explorer_command_execution_vulnerability_test/

Vulnerability 1 and 2, or 3 alone, 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) Microsoft has issued patches, for more information:
Further details available in Customer Area

Provided and/or discovered by
1) Discovered independently by:
* http-equiv
* Andreas Sandblad of Secunia Research (reported to Microsoft on 2004-10-13).

2) Discovered by:
* http-equiv

Additional information provided by:
* Roozbeh Afrasiabi

3) Discovered by:
* Paul, Greyhats Security
* Michael Evanchik

Additional information provided by:
* ShredderSub7

Changelog
Further details available in Customer Area

Original Advisory
MS05-001 (KB890175):
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS05-001.mspx

MS05-014 (KB867282):
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms05-014.mspx

3) http://freehost07.websamba.com/greyhats/sp2rc-analysis.htm

Other references
Further details available in Customer Area

Deep Links
Links available in Customer Area