Critical security flaw in Firefox 3 found five hours after launch
Posted by: in General News
Well, that didn’t take long.
From online security research firm Tipping Point:
What we can confirm is that about five hours after the official release of Firefox 3.0 on June 17th, our Zero Day Initiative program received a critical vulnerability affecting Firefox 3.0 as well as prior versions of Firefox 2.0.x. We verified the vulnerability in our lab, acquired it from the researcher, then promptly reported the vulnerability to the Mozilla security team shortly after. Successful exploitation of the vulnerability could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code. Not unlike most browser based vulnerabilities that we see these days, user interaction is required such as clicking on a link in email or visiting a malicious web page.
The developers at Mozilla are reportedly already cooking up a fix.
Firefox 3 seems like a great browser, and is a huge improvement over its predecessor.
But the episode does illustrate one downside to Firefox’s booming popularity: with a growing market share, the browser is going to be a much more popular target for hackers.
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