Software Engineering Institute

HP Services provides online product support services including HP Instant Support. The HPISDataManager.dll ActiveX control contains the insecure function AppendStringToFile(), which can be exploited by a malicious attacker to execute arbitrary files on a vulnerable system.

Note that the HP Support Services ActiveX control is locked to certain domains, such as hp.com. This means that an attacker would have to subvert the host name lookup methodology on a victim's system or exploit a cross-site scripting vulnerability in one of the allowed domains to exploit this vulnerability.

A remote, unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability to write to arbitrary files on a vulnerable system.

HP suggests to install HP Instant Support - v1.0.0.24 or later. For installation instructions, please visit the HP Support Document. However, limited testing has shown that this update does not change the behavior with respect to unsafe methods.

From the HP Support Document:

The vulnerabilities can also be resolved by the following procedure:

Set the kill bit for the vulnerable ActiveX control's Class identifier (CLSID) {14C1B87C-3342-445F-9B5E-365FF330A3AC} . The kill bit is set by modifying the data value of the Compatibility Flags DWORD value for the CLSID of this ActiveX control to 0x00000400. This is explained in Microsoft's article KB240797 or subsequent. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/240797