English
The Internet threat alert status is currently normal. At present, no major epidemics or other serious incidents have been recorded by Kaspersky Lab’s monitoring service. Internet threat level: 1

Microsoft Outlook "mailto:" URI Handling Vulnerability


Secunia ID

SA29320

CVE-ID

CVE-2008-0110

Release Date

11 Mar 2008

Last Change

12 Mar 2008

Criticality

Highly Critical

Solution Status

Vendor Patch

Software

Microsoft Office 2000
Microsoft Office 2003 Professional Edition
Microsoft Office 2003 Small Business Edition
Microsoft Office 2003 Standard Edition
Microsoft Office 2003 Student and Teacher Edition
Microsoft Office 2007
Microsoft Office XP
Microsoft Outlook 2000
Microsoft Outlook 2002
Microsoft Outlook 2003
Microsoft Outlook 2007

Where

From remote

Impact
System access

This covers vulnerabilities where malicious people are able to gain system access and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of a local user.

Description

A vulnerability has been reported in Microsoft Outlook, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system.

The vulnerability is caused due to an error when handling a specially crafted "mailto:" URI passed from a web browser. This can be exploited to pass extra command line switches to Outlook.

Successful exploitation allows execution of arbitrary code when a user e.g. visits a malicious website.

Solution

Apply patches.

Outlook 2000 SP3:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=714a49cd-5bca-4719-96a1-e1077f279533

Outlook 2002 SP3:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=59853687-d885-4059-9460-ee403855dbd8

Outlook 2003 SP2:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=fccc7c4c-8496-4682-bd46-6590503c1bf2

Outlook 2003 SP3:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=fccc7c4c-8496-4682-bd46-6590503c1bf2

Outlook 2007:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4e2baf00-88eb-4eb6-961a-54245b363c21

Reported by

Greg MacManus, iDefense Labs.

Original Advisory

MS08-015 (KB949031):
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS08-015.mspx

iDefense Labs:
http://labs.idefense.com/intelligence/vulnerabilities/display.php?id=673