CVE-2003-0838: Microsoft Ie

High severity, CVSS 7.5. EPSS: 37.6% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

Internet Explorer allows remote attackers to bypass zone restrictions to inject and execute arbitrary programs by creating a popup window and inserting ActiveX object code with a "data" tag pointing to the malicious code, which Internet Explorer treats as HTML or Javascript, but later executes as an HTA application, a different vulnerability than CVE-2003-0532, and as exploited using the QHosts Trojan horse (aka Trojan.Qhosts, QHosts-1, VBS.QHOSTS, or aolfix.exe).

Affected products

  • Microsoft Ie: version 6.0 only
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer: version 5.0.1 only; version 5.5 only; version 6.0 only

Published 2003-11-17. Last modified 2026-06-16.