Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7 DoS Exploit
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.""
I checked out the Mozilla site -- not a peep about it. I made a post there. I figure this one totally right hooked them. It's a pretty massive crash. Just makes the whole browser lock up. At least I know they'll fix it fast though...I think in 24 hours we'll see a turn around. Anyone try this with version 1.5?
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
Why are there so many nice hackers in the world? Willing to spend their time finding exploits, post them, and even a "safe" example. Do they take pride in helping the surfing community? Why don't they just hijack the world's browsers and make us choose between "Yes" and "Okay" on their PayPal deposit sites?
Where are the evil hackers, or have they all converted, scared about stiff http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4249780.stm penalties?
~jennifer.k~
. . . RTFA,
milw0rm.com have released proof of concept code for a denial of service exploit which apparently affects all versions of the Mozilla Foundations popular Firefox browser from version 1.0.7 downward.
Remember, on Slashdot always read the article, it is generally only a coincidence if the summary has any bearing on the actual linked text.
How long has a webpage that makes a browser crash been called a "Denial Of Service Exploit".
A browser that can be crashed is a very bad thing, but suggesting this is some sort of "Denial Of Service" attack, is just semantics. It doesn't crash the box, and it doesn't flood/break the network. Every other service on your machine runs as normal. That's not a Denial Of Service by the usual definition of the term.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
This can freeze your browser.
Wheres the vulnerability? when does the spyware attack? Do I need to reinstall Windows?
Should I buy a virus checker?
Anyone stupid enough to host this "exploit" on their site are just dumb,
"oooooh it makes your firefox freeze" BFD - stay away from dodgy parts of the net
(goatse is a bigger "exploit" and generally leads to complete machine shutdown/restart as you attempt to hide it from your colleagues)
liqbase
The exploit is:
t ml>
<html><body><strong>Mozilla<sourcetext></body></h
and it also makes Mozilla suite 1.7.12 hang.
The sourcetext tag is used when a parser error occurs; the Mozilla DOMParser will accept any string and always returns a valid XML DOM object, but in the case that the string was malformed, it returns something like this:
<parsererror xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">XML Parsing Error: mismatched tag. Expected: </strong>. Location: file:///1253.html Line Number 3, Column 37:<sourcetext> (text here) </sourcetext></parsererror>
which you may have seen formatted before in a nice red-on-yellow page.
So clicking on a link can lock up the browser. So what?
How is this any different from this, which effectively locks up *all* current browsers?
<script>
while(true){
alert('Haha!');
}
<script>
This is hardly important. I don't see any way this can crash my machine or infect me with a trojan.
PS if you want a fix for the above vote for bug 61098] at bugzilla.
Not necessarily.
I reported some DOS bugs against firefox which will kill a browser by essentially saying:
The browser dies. Probably because it attempts to either a) allocate all the system's memory and the kernel kills it, or b) at some point memory allocation fails and the program terminates.
Not all crashes are buffer overflows, or exploitable.
Any ideas as to what is going wrong?
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
I think the poll at the top of the page should ask, "Do you trust WhiteDust security?"
Oh, wait - that's what the 'Test the exploit' link is for.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
This crasher bug has no effect on my post 1.5 beta 2 version of firefox on Linux. Gecko/20051017. A new crasher bug is also not news. There are hundreds of ways to crash mozilla. Lets face it most browsers aren't at a state to jump every time there is a new bug to crash or "DOS Them" as the article states. Just another security site trying to make themselves look good at a products expense. How much money does it cause companies like the Mozilla Organization to release a new version of their browser, just to put an end to the bad press of a so called "exploit"?
And let's suppose it is in the wild and to get infected I don't have to go to some Russian site selling stolen credit cards. Can anyone see how that could be possible? You'd have to go to a site knowingly and maliciously designed to exploit this, right?