Advisories

Firefox Might Be Forced to Admit IE's Superiority

Because of security flaws

By Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor

1st of June 2007, 19:06 GMT

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Firefox is no longer securer than Microsoft's Internet Explorer as Mozilla's browser is very often brought in the spotlights by the security flaw discovered in its engine. Yesterday, it was reported that Firefox contains several vulnerabilities that can allow an attacker to connect to an affected system and obtain higher privileges. Today, Firefox is included into a new Secunia advisory, the security company

informing that the browser contains a not-critical flaw that can help a malicious user gain private information about the computer. It seems that Firefox is not the only affected program, SeaMonkey being also mentioned in the notification. Although the security flaw was already fixed in the recently released Firefox 2.0.0.4, it might become vulnerable as it contains older files from the previous versions.

"A security issue has been reported in Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Seamonkey, which can be exploited by malicious people to disclose potentially sensitive information. The security issue is caused due to the browser not properly restricting "resource://" URIs to be loaded into the JavaScript space. Combined with directory traversal due to insufficient filtering of certain character sequences, this can be exploited to disclose e.g. the default security settings," Secunia mentioned.

The solution to avoid successful exploitation is at least harsh because Secunia advises users to visit only trusted websites, a very difficult thing to do, as today's Internet is quite evolved and has a huge amount of pages.

Given the recent security advisories, Mozilla Firefox is more and more threatened by its rival Internet Explorer that is often regarded as the classic alternative to this revolutionary browser. Since Internet Explorer 7 was released, the Microsoft application was accused for copying Mozilla's tool as Firefox was the first program that included tabbed browsing.

If you want to download the latest version of Firefox, you can take it straight from Softpedia using this link. Internet Explorer is also published on Softpedia.

TAGS:

firefox | security | vulnerability | flaw

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