Firefox shares flaw on Mac OSX and Windows
By Jonathan Schlaffer
As the venerable Rod Serling said “You are now entering a new dimension, not of sight nor sound but of mind, the signpost ahead, The Twilight Zone,” and welcome to it dear readers. The “Hack a Mac” contest held some days ago revealed a flaw in the Safari browser, or that’s what was thought at the time. Network World reports on the flaw which actually exists on Windows as well.
It seems that not only Macs are vulnerable to this flaw but so are Windows based PCs running Firefox as their primary browser. Can’t we be safe anywhere these days?
The flaw on both Mac and Windows lies in the way QuickTime Media Player works with Java programming. You could say that the flaw lies in Java for simplicity but that’s not entirely true. At any rate the flaw exists in Safari and Firefox on Macs and in Firefox on PCs.
This exploit is almost as serious as the ANI bug that plagued Windows a while back, which has been patched but the patch is unstable on some systems either due to varying hardware or software configurations, I’m not sure which.
Network World has also described the exploit and what it does in very gruesome details or at least as many details as I can stand so if you want more information why not give the links a read?
We’re all agreed that Mac OSX can do without something similar to the ANI flaw but let’s be reminded that only 24 hours after the ANI flaw on Windows was disclosed, sites and links exploiting the flaw cropped up overnight reaching thousands in number. I have never seen this happen with an OSX flaw; whether that’s due to the low market share or “secure” nature of OSX, feel free to debate amongst yourselves.
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April 24th, 2007
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April 25th, 2007
“Can’t be safe anywhere this days?”
You can be safe anywhere you want, just use NoScript
http://noscript.net
April 25th, 2007
Thanks, for that, great tip and nice extension.
April 25th, 2007
This sounds more like a Quicktime bug than anything else.
April 27th, 2007
It’s a variety of things… it’s Quicktime, it’s Java, it’s Firefox/Safari and now I’m told IE…
Apple could patch Quicktime to fix it, Sun could patch Java to fix it, I’m no programmer and with all the involved programs being tossed around in sentences I honestly can’t be sure. My pick is between Quicktime or Java but it was discovered in Safari then in Firefox and then in IE.
March 2nd, 2008
Creating an Email Newsletter from Microsoft Word…
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