http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,904627,00.asp

By Dennis Fisher
February 26, 2003

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday issued a patch for a new critical
vulnerability in Windows Me that gives attackers the ability to
execute code on remote machines.

The vulnerability is the result of a buffer overrun in the Help and
Support Center in Windows Me. Specifically, the problem lies in the
URL handler for the "hcp://" prefix, which is used to execute URL
links to the Help and Support Center.

In order to exploit the flaw, an attacker would need to create a URL
that would execute the attacker's code when the user clicked on it.
The attacker could either host the URL on a Web site or send it to a
user in e-mail.

In the Web-based attack, if the user clicked on the URL, the attacker
would then be able to read or open files on the user's machine. If the
URL was sent via e-mail, the scenario is a bit more complicated. Users
running Outlook 2002 or Outlook Express 6.0 in their default
configurations or Outlook 98 or 2000 with the Outlook Email Security
Update installed would still need to click on the link in order to
launch the attack.

However, users not running one of the above configurations would be
vulnerable to an automated attack that would launch as soon as they
opened the malicious e-mail, according to Microsoft's advisory.

The patch for this vulnerability is available here [1].

[1] http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/security/bulletin/MS03-006.asp

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