Critical Microsoft Internet Explorer Security Bulletin MS10-018

April 2010

Executive Summary

This security update resolves nine privately reported vulnerabilities and one publicly disclosed vulnerability in Internet Explorer. The most severe vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

This security update is rated Critical for all supported releases of Internet Explorer: Internet Explorer 5.01, Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1, Internet Explorer 6 on Windows clients, Internet Explorer 7, and Internet Explorer 8 on Windows clients. For Internet Explorer 6 on Windows servers, this update is rated Important. And for Internet Explorer 8 on Windows servers, this update is rated Moderate. For more information, see the subsection, Affected and Non-Affected Software, in this section.

The security update addresses these vulnerabilities by modifying the way that Internet Explorer verifies the origin of scripts and handles objects in memory, content using encoding strings, and long URL. For more information about the vulnerabilities, see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) subsection under the next section, Vulnerability Information.

This security update also addresses the vulnerability first described in Microsoft Security Advisory 981374. The vulnerability, CVE-2010-0806, does not affect Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, or Internet Explorer 8.

Recommendation

The majority of customers have automatic updating enabled and will not need to take any action because this security update will be downloaded and installed automatically. Customers who have not enabled automatic updating need to check for updates and install this update manually. For information about specific configuration options in automatic updating, see Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 294871.

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