Winter 2011: Password security standards and trendsThe Mozilla Foundation has released Firefox version 2.0.0.6, addressing critical flaws that involved unescaped URLs passing to external programs and privilege escalation through chrome-loaded about:blank windows.
Last week, independent security researcher Billy Rios, said in an update on his blog that an input validation error could be delivered through the Firefox browser, enabling full access to the machine..
"You simply have to have IE7 installed somewhere on your system for this to work (which is basically most WindowsXP Sp2 systems)," he said.
Danish vulnerability clearinghouse Secunia rated the flaw "highly critical" in its 26201 advisory Thursday because attackers could exploit it remotely. Secunia said users must visit a malicious Web site in order for the flaw to be exploited successfully.
"The vulnerability is caused due to an input validation error within the handling of system default URIs with registered URI handlers (e.g. 'mailto', 'news', 'nntp', 'snews', 'telnet')," Secunia said in its advisory.
Secunia said the vulnerability is confirmed on a fully
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Michael S. Mimoso, Editorial Director
patched Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 SP2 system using Firefox version 2.0.0.5 and Netscape Navigator version 9.0b2.
The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) also issued a US-CERT 783400 advisory, warning that Mozilla Firefox fails to properly filter input when sending certain URIs to registered protocol handlers.
"This vulnerability may allow a remote, authenticated attacker to execute commands on a vulnerable system," the agency said in its advisory.