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Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7 DoS Exploit

Posted by Hemos on from the to-be-confirmed-or-not-confirmed dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Whitedust Security are reporting on a new exploit for Firefox which apparently affects all versions of the browser from 1.0.7 down. From the article: "If this exploit has made it out into, or indeed been retrieved from the wild is unknown at this time. However it is clear that this exploit will indeed need patching as soon as possible.""

17 of 438 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How come there are so many nice hackers? by Red_Foreman · · Score: 1, Interesting
    I think you're probably trolling, but:
    Yes, we do take pride in our community coming together and developing a quality product free for everyone to use.

    Plus, the Open Source Community is far more nimble when it comes to fixing bugs of this nature. Part of the reason is that you have more eyeballs looking at the code and two is that there's more code review and so there's less bugs and less severe bugs with most OSS projects.

  2. Re:Not too big a deal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I came across something like this developing Javascript. It hangs the browsing for a few minutes. Though in my case Firefox eventually asked me if I want to abort the script. I thought it was just a normal side-effect of weird Javascript combined with Mozilla/Firefox's lack of multi-threading. I think I'll file a bug report in any case, but probably not as big a deal because Firefox actually recovers from it.

  3. Re:Not too big a deal by gromitcode · · Score: 1, Interesting

    if you can crash the browser it means you are probably in a buffer overflow situation or some other potentially exploitable bug, these are EXACTLY what malicious people look for. just because the proof of concept only crashes the browser doesn't make it useless for malicous people.

  4. Mozilla too.. by Dynamoo · · Score: 2, Interesting
    It also locks up Mozila 1.7.8, so I guess it will also do the same to Netscape 8 if using the Firefox renderer.

    There's not much to it though:

    <!--
    posidron@tripbit.net

    Vulnerable: Mozilla Firefox <= 1.0.7
    Mozilla Thunderbird <= 1.0.6
    -->

    <html><body><strong>Mozilla<sourcetext></body></ht ml>

    Ah well, not much harm done. Of course, there's nothing to stop Microsoft putting it into MSN deliberately to break the browser, in much the same way they tried to nobble Opera some months back.

    --
    Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
  5. Here is the exploit (the text of the html) by putko · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Here's the exploit:
    <html><body><strong>Mozilla<sourcetext></body></ht ml>
    Note: that last thing really is "html", but I think slashcode rewrites it.

    Any ideas as to what is going wrong?
    --
    http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_s tone_your_children/dt21_18a.html
    1. Re:Here is the exploit (the text of the html) by randyflood · · Score: 2, Interesting


      You can also use italic in place of strong (and probably some other things too, but I haven't ehaustively tested them...)

      You can also encrypt the whole thing as a JavaScript and have it dynamically decrypted by a JavaScript and printed out to the Web Browser as mentioned here: http://justfriends4n0w.blogspot.com/

      --
      Randy.Flood@RHCE2B.COM
  6. Re:How come there are so many nice hackers? by Iriel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Honestly, the evil hackers got smarter. Not all of them mind you (most of the famed worming script-kiddies still get caught). But all those malevolent 'hackers' know that cracking the world's browsers is too easy to trace or not worth the effort to keep under the radar. You know all those "Prescriptlon RXc dirugs 4for l0w coest!" emails? That just came specially delivered to you courtesy of the former uber-hacker of unknowable enormity. They're even worse that telemarketers that scam the elderly, and they're hoping you're the next $50 bill in their offshore account.

    --
    Perfecting Discordia
    www.stevenvansickle.com
  7. Re:1.0.7 is affected by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    WTF? 'From 1.07 downwards' means '1.07 and every version before it'. I dunno where you get this 'contrary to the article' nonsense.

  8. Re:Very vague by Mistshadow2k4 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    A good hosts file can fix that, no matter what browser or OS you're running.

    (I'm in the mood to be helpful today instead of giving my usual serving of sarcastic remarks. God knows why.)

    --
    I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
  9. Re:But... by MrShaggy · · Score: 0, Interesting

    Maybe instead of having the little green arrow, add in "There are updates available", or something.

    --
    I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
  10. Re:Tested the exploit by thegoogler · · Score: 2, Interesting

    using 1.0.7 on ubuntu right now, and it did indeed lock up

    hmm

  11. Re:Very vague by goldspider · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Are you suggesting that vulnerabilities in Firefox and other popular OSS software aren't newsworthy? Or are you saying that such news should be actively supressed for the sake of the 'movement'?

    --
    "Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
  12. Denial of Service = Less critical. by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 1, Interesting

    websites have been suffering DoS attacks and they can't do anything about it (specially if they're distributed).

    DoS is the last resource for a hacker when he can't penetrate the website's server. It's not "hacking" in fact.

    What astounds me is that people seem less afraid of remote execution vulnerabilities than of DoS attacks. Or is it just me?

  13. Re:Not too big a deal by Lucractius · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Malicious no... Devious yes...

    Suppose you have vested interests in Firefox not succeeding as a Web Browser and you hacked/setup some major site to lockup firefox and dramaticaly decrease tbe userbase over the course of a few hours...

    --
    XML - A clever joke would be here if /. didn't mangle tag brackets.
  14. Hmmm.. security? by pavera · · Score: 4, Interesting

    OK, the IE fanboys are really stretching now. If crashing the browser is an "exploit" then that opens a whole new avenue of attack on IE. IE crashes like this (for me) far more often then firefox, and firefox crashes just about every time I visit a site with really involved flash or those really annoying smiley face banner ads (those are firefox killers).

    ctrl+alt+del kill process is a good workaround for this "extremely dangerous" exploit. Again if this is a security vulnerability, then flash is the greatest hacking tool against firefox. Java is probably the greatest hacking tool against IE.

    People are just really desparate for Firefox to have more bugs than IE. Thanks for finding some code that should probably be cleaned up, but crashing the browser is not in any way violating the security of the system on which the browser is running.

  15. Did anyone *see* the exploit by metalmaniac1759 · · Score: 2, Interesting 
    Mozillay ></html></pre>

    That's it - that's the frikkin' exploit! How the f*** is open source software supposed to be more secure when bugs like this creep into a post 1.x release!

    Nandz.
  16. Re:totally off guard by nmb3000 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Did it take the OS with it? ;)

    Fortunately it didn't. Though I suppose if you set firefox.exe's priority to Realtime first...

    Nah. This is one of those exercises I'm leaving to the reader :)

    --
    "What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
    /)