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Question: Is it possible to construct a web page that has a script to turn off XML data-binding in MSIE? The ideal approach would be to code an HTML page and instruct all people in the office to visit the page with a button that says "turn off data-binding".

Rationale: The desktop sysadmin is not available at this time and the goal is to create a brain-dead simple way to let people turn this feature off without having to walk them through a bunch of MSIE configuration menus.

+1  A: 

I'm assuming you're talking about Microsoft Security Advisory (961051).

If you could disable XML data-binding using client-side script, then someone could enable it with client-side script and expose the vulnerability again. So that isn't possible.

However, if everyone is running the same version of Windows and the same bitness flavor, then just send them to a page where they can copy and paste this into Start > Run:

Regsvr32.exe /u "Program Files\Common Files\System\Ole DB\oledb32.dll"

Note that this will protect against current attacks but to comprehensively protect against the vulnerability they recommend applying another workaround. More on that here.

And encouraging your employees to go to a website in an E-mail and run something they've been told to run is probably a bad idea as it opens them up to various phishing attacks since most people won't be able to distinguish between an E-mail from their own company IT department and an E-mail sent by a malicious person.

More about the available workarounds here.

In the end, the best practice would be to push out one of the workarounds as described in the above KB article.

Grant Wagner