Software Engineering Institute

According to the reporter, McAfee VirusScan Enterprise for Windows version 8.7i through at least 8.8 patch 7 contains a scriptproxy COM object that is vulnerable to the following:

CWE-824: Access of Uninitialized Pointer

According to the reporter, when attempting to load the McAfee VirusScan Enterprise scriptproxy COM object DLL via CLSID in an HTML document through Internet Explorer, the DLL may crash in such a way as to cause an access violation on the instruction pointer, which may lead to denial of service.

The CERT/CC has not received a CVE ID assignment from McAfee for this issue at this time. Intel Security, which owns McAfee, has provided the following response:

Intel Security takes any claim of this kind very seriously. We have requested and are awaiting the information we require to conduct our assessment. We look forward to receiving this information.

By convincing a user to view a specially crafted HTML document (e.g., a web page or an HTML email message or attachment), an attacker may be able to cause a denial of service.

The CERT/CC is currently unaware of a practical solution to this problem. However, affected users may consider the following workaround:

Disable the McAfee ActiveX control in Internet Explorer

The vulnerable McAfee ActiveX control can be disabled in Internet Explorer by setting the kill bit for the following CLSID:

{7DB2D5A0-7241-4E79-B68D-6309F01C5231}

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ActiveX Compatibility\{7DB2D5A0-7241-4E79-B68D-6309F01C5231}]
"Compatibility Flags"=dword:00000400
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ActiveX Compatibility\{7DB2D5A0-7241-4E79-B68D-6309F01C5231}]
"Compatibility Flags"=dword:00000400