A security vulnerability that could affect users of Microsoft Corp.’s Outlook 2000 and 2002 e-mail clients who use the company’s Word application as an e-mail editor has been patched, according to an advisory from Microsoft.
The vulnerability results from different security settings in the two applications used when an e-mail is being read and when it is being written, Microsoft said. When an e-mail is displayed in Outlook, the program uses the security settings of Internet Explorer, often configured to disallow the execution of scripts. When the e-mail is replied to or forwarded using Microsoft Word as the application to write the e-mail, Word’s security settings are used, which allow scripts to be run, the company said.
If an attacker were to send an HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) e-mail containing a script to a user who had their PC configured this way, then any code of the attacker’s choice could be run on the target PC if the user replied to or forwarded the e-mail, said Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash.
Users who have applied Office XP Service Pack 1 are protected against this hole, the company said.
This issue was also the subject of a recent vulnerability announcement by independent security researcher Georgi Guninski.
More information about the flaw and the patch to fix it are available at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms02-021.asp.