Mozilla's head of security yesterday confirmed a bug in Firefox that could be used by attackers to scout out a system prior to mounting a more thorough assault. The flaw, said Window Snyder, Mozilla Corp.'s chief security officer, is in the browser's chrome protocol, she said in response to reports of the vulnerability and the public posting of a proof-of-concept exploit. "Chrome" is the Firefox term for its user interface. Access to a user's machine would be through one of many Firefox extensions packaged in a flat file structure, rather than collected into a single Java archive, or .jar file, said Snyder. Several popular add-ons, including Download Statusbar and Greasemonkey, use a flat file structure. "Users are only at risk if they have one of the 'flat' packaged add-ons installed," Snyder said on the Mozilla security blog.
By leading users to a tricked-out Web page, criminals could sniff for information that might be useful in more aggressive attacks, Snyder acknowledged. "A visited attacking page is able to load images, scripts or style sheets from known locations on the disk," she said. "Attackers may use this method to detect the presence of files which may give an attacker information about which applications are installed. This information may be used to profile the system for a different kind of attack." Firefox developers are working on a patch, according to a thread on Bugzilla, Mozilla's bug-tracking and management site, but a fix has not yet been coded.
View: Full Story @ Computerworld
Because if this was IE, every IT news site would be all over it.
Can't have a double-standard, fanboy.
Wow.
Because it's news, and this is a news site?
however you have no idea where that tesco is so the thieves will need to run around to every single tesco to find out which one it is...and by the time they have, the security guard will be back and the doors locked
Firefox users can also deploy another add-on, the popular NoScript, to block exploits, regardless of which extensions have been installed, updated or not. "[NoScript] block[s] chrome JavaScript load attempts," reported Giorgio Maone, NoScript's maker, on the same Bugzilla thread.
Not a permanent fix (lol ...is anything related to browsers permanent?) but something that can be used while something is developed.
Last edited by UAC on 24 Jan 2008 - 09:04
you're bang on if you mean the one that the cat uses.
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