Mozilla security chief confirms data leakage bug in Firefox Mozilla's chief of security has confirmed a vulnerability that could cause fully patched versions of Firefox to expose a user's private data. The confirmation, which was posted here by Mozilla's Window Snyder, follows the release of proof-of-concept code by researcher Gerry Eisenhaur. The bug resides in Firefox's chrome …
'Anyone who uses firefox is going to have at least some knowledge of security!'
And of course anyone who uses IE is a braindead untermensch who deserves to be hacked for financing Mr Gates' evil empire......
Firefox has become increasingly popular with non-technical users (I know several) and its popularity means that its increasingly open to scrutiny in terms of vulnerability....
Could we perhaps cease the knee-jerk 'MS bad. Firefox/Linux/Apple good' litanies that seem so prevalent on here and accept the fact that popular systems get hacked?
And for that matter, could we cease the smug, persistent myth that all end users are cretins? Just because you dont possess the complete works of Douglas Adams doesnt make you an idiot........
(Paris invoked here because I have a sneaking suspicion that she might not be as stupid as she looks either.....)
"As for adding an attacking website to your list of trusted sites, that a complete no brainer!!"
Not that simple though. If I visit a 'complex' site with NoScript running it can end up blocking several hosts and the site is completely broken. So you have to work out which hosts are important to make it work again. There's no simple way (yet) of knowing whether you can trust an individual host, so you still end up trusting them anyway or else your site remains broken.
It requires a fair bit of research to find out what each host gets up to. I bet most people running NoScript have unknown hosts which were trusted because the main site was trusted. That still leaves you open to malpractice by embedded content, which is on the increase.
So in a sense NoScript can only protect you in the same way that leaving your computer switched off can protect you. Anything else requires user decisions and research and is prone to error and misdirection like anything else.
If you read my first comment, you'd know this specific chrome script protection is independent from your whitelist, i.e. it applies to every site no matter if JavaScript is enabled or not (opposite to what Dan's article suggests).
@DJGM:
yes, it applies to SeaMonkey as well.
> its popularity means that its increasingly open to scrutiny in terms of vulnerability....
Vulnerabilities are not dependent on the number of users, and as the source code has been freely available for download since day one you'd think this would be a more efficient method of being "open to scrutiny". Yet still FF remains more secure, quite likely *because* it is open to scrutiny.
"Vulnerabilities are not dependent on the number of users, and as the source code has been freely available for download since day one you'd think this would be a more efficient method of being "open to scrutiny". Yet still FF remains more secure, quite likely *because* it is open to scrutiny."
Hang on a second, didn't we recently have a report that in fact more vulnerabilities were found in FF over the same period of time than IE.
Of course then all the FF fanbois at our place started saying "Well, that just means they're better at finding exploits" ... Of course they wouldn't recognise such an argument if I made it about Windows!
Like arguing with a brick wall.
> more vulnerabilities were found in FF over the same period of time than IE.
Yeah, right - and like all Microsoft apologists you attempt to reduce the real issues down to a childishly simplistic 'vulnerability count'. If your 'method' had any validity or meaning then FF would be as vulnerable (or worse) than IE - yet *still* it isn't.
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