Article by George Norman

On 22 Mar 2010

Late this February we were reporting that Firefox 3.6, the latest and greatest version in the Firefox range, is plagued by a critical security vulnerability - that's the rating given to it by Secunia , Danish company that specializes in providing software for vulnerability management and is best known for tracking the latest security threats and offering info about patches.

The vulnerability in question was discovered by a Russian security expert from Intevydis, company that made it available to their customers - Intevydis, develops the commercial VulnDisco add-on for the Canvas exploit toolkit by vendor Immunity.


According to Intevydis developer Evgeny Legerov, the vulnerability in question is a buffer overflow vulnerability that can be used to remotely take control of the targeted machine. Sounds bad, I know. The good news is that only Firefox 3.6 is affected and only the Windows version – the Mac OS X and Linux versions are fine.

When news of this vulnerability broke out, Mozilla announced that it cannot confirm the vulnerability is genuine as it did not receive any details about it. For example a proof-of-concept or steps to reproduce the vulnerability in question would have been helpful. Furthermore, the security researcher that uncovered the vulnerability, Evgeny Legerov, failed to respond to Mozilla’s requests for more information – until now that is.

About a month after spreading the word that Firefox 3.6 is plagued by a critical security vulnerability, Evgeny Legerov has finally contacted Mozilla.

“Mozilla was contacted by Evgeny Legerov, the security researcher who discovered the bug referenced in the Secunia report, with sufficient details to reproduce and analyze the issue. The vulnerability was determined to be critical and could result in remote code execution by an attacker. The vulnerability has been patched by developers and we are currently undergoing quality assurance testing for the fix. Firefox 3.6.2 is scheduled to be released March 30th and will contain the fix for this issue. As always, we encourage users to apply this update as soon as it is available to ensure a safe browsing experience,” explained Mozilla.

Again, only Firefox 3.6 is affected; previous versions are not affected by this vulnerability. The upcoming Firefox 3.6.2 version is not affected as well – the downside is that for now you can only get a release candidate build of Firefox 3.6.2 – click here.



Tags: Mozilla, Firefox, Firefox 3.6, Security, Intevydis

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