Firefox Was the Most Attacked & Exploited Browser At Pwn2own 2014

darthcamaro writes "Though IE, Chrome and Safari were all attacked and all were exploited, no single web browser was exploited at this year's Pwn2own hacking challenge as Mozilla Firefox. A fully patched version of Firefox was exploited four different times by attackers, each revealing new zero-day vulnerabilities in the open-source web browser. When asked why Mozilla was attacked so much this year, Sid Stamm, senior engineering manager of security and privacy said, 'Pwn2Own offers very large financial incentives to researchers to expose vulnerabilities, and that may have contributed in part to the researchers' decision to wait until now to share their work and help protect Firefox users.' The Pwn2own event paid researchers $50,000 for each Firefox vulnerability. Mozilla now pays researcher only $3,000 per vulnerability."

Comments

Re:Firefox is the most unstable program in common

[ahabswhale]

That's odd, I keep literally dozens of tabs open in it all the time and haven't had it crash on me for as long as I can remember.

Re:Yes.

[vux984]

Most people don't open a lot of windows and tabs at the same time.

Define many. I routiney have 10+ windows with 20+ tabs in most of them, and another 10+ windows with 1 or 2 tabs.

I do software development; not primarily web based, but it comes up both in web apps and web services, so I'm regularly loading and debugging sites that are rendering pretty broken stuff too.

I honestly can't recall the last time FF crashed on me for any reason.

The problem is much worse when many windows and tabs are open under the Windows OS and Windows is hibernated several times.

I haven't rebooted my Mac in ages -- last time I installed an update that needed a reboot. A few months easy.

My home office win 7 destkop gets rebooted around once a month for windows updates. Sleep/hibernate/wakeups the rest of the time.

I'm not disputing your experience. But I do wonder whether your crashes are tied to a particular plugin, or are linked to some other characteristic of your system. We use FF at the office as well, on dozens of computers -- stability is NOT problem there as well. Don't know what to tell you.

Re:Firefox is the most unstable program in common

[ahabswhale]

I would recommend noscript. Firefox does have a glaring flaw in that all the tabs run in the same process so if one gets wonky, it's game over for everything. It's probably flash that's killing you. I use noscript which blocks everything (like flash) that I don't explicitly want running and it makes Firefox very stable. As a side benefit, it makes browsing much safer. I use Chrome a lot too but when I'm going to any questionable sites, I use firefox just because of noscript.