Win-XP Help Center request wipes your HD

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StormBringer

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By Thomas C Greene in Washington
Posted: 11/09/2002 at 13:15 GMT


A malicious Win-XP Help Center request can easily and silently delete the contents of any directory on your Windows machine, we've learned. Worse, MS has rolled the fix silently into SP1 without making a public announcement. A good sketch of the problem in English, along with a harmless self-test, can be found here, thanks to Mike at http://unity.skankhouse.org who did some tinkering after noticing a tip on a BBS.




To verify the exploit all you need to do is pop the following request into any address bar (IE, Win Explorer, etc): hcp://system/DFS/uplddrvinfo.htm?file://c:\test\* and the directory 'test' will be emptied after a couple of Help Center 'wizard' pages pop up uselessly to distract you......

The example works as advertised, so anyone wanting to play with it should create a test directory with copies of files. Of course you can delete your entire root directory with this approach if you so choose.......
 
I heard about this the other day from one of my buddies. I don't understand why M$ wouldn't say something about it. This is the sort of stuff that makes me mad about those rich aholes. But that is just me. I hope there is a way to fix it.......
 
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