In this case it was used via an iFrame on nobelpeaceprize.org which then downloaded malware to the visitors machine using a multi-exploit back-end which amongst others also leveraged this 0day Firefox exploit.

Malicious hackers have exploited an unpatched vulnerability in the latest version of Firefox to attack people visiting the Nobel Peace Prize website, a Norway-based security firm said on Tuesday.

Mozilla representatives confirmed a “critical vulnerability” in versions 3.5 and 3.6 of the open-source browser. It came several hours after the organization members were said to have made the same admission on this password-protected Bugzilla page. According to Einar Oftedal, a detection executive at Norman ASA in Oslo, the official website for the Nobel Peace prize, nobelpeaceprize.org, was compromised so that it contained an iframe link to a malicious server.

“This iframe has a multi exploit backend and serves exploits for Firefox, including a working remote exploit for Firefox 3.6.11,” he said in an instant message to The Register. “We didn’t see any 0day for IE,” he added, referring to Microsoft’s browser.

Mozilla claims they will address this issue soon and past history dictates that a patch will come out within a few days, so look forwards to Firefox 3.6.12 by the end of the week. It seems to be a fairly advanced and targeted attack.

Of course the conspiracy theorists will say that the attack was carried out by the Chinese Government as their way of complaining that the most recent Nobel Peace Prize was given to a Chinese dissident named Liu Xiaobo.

He said the attack exploited a race condition vulnerability in Firefox to force end users to install malware his firm has dubbed Belmoo. The Windows executable was created on Sunday and attempts to connect to several internet addresses, according to his analysis.

If the addresses resolve, “the malware attaches a command shell to the opened socket, giving an attacker access on the local computer with the same rights as the logged on user.” If not, the malware will exit.

If Norman’s report proves accurate, it’s the first time in recent memory attackers have exploited an unpatched vulnerability in Firefox. Most so-called zero-day attacks are perpetrated against Adobe Reader or Flash Player, Microsoft software and to a lesser extent Oracle’s Java. The report is also unusual because the attack didn’t appear to target other applications, as is typical with exploit packages.

Hours after the reports surfaced, Mozilla said it would issue a fix as soon as possible. In the meantime, users can protect themselves by disabling JavaScript altogether or installing the NoScript extension that allows users to control which websites are permitted to run JavaScript.

As per usual you can protect yourself against this flaw by using NoScript or disabling JavaScript functionality in your browser.

It’s been a while since there’s been a serious bug in Firefox, most of the recent ones have not been exploitable or have involved passive activities like data leakage and clickjacking.

Source: The Register

There are others like Google offering rewards for bugs in Chrome, and other specific high profile bounties like when Microsoft Offered $250K Bounty for Conficker Author.

Mozilla on Thursday boosted bug bounty payments six-fold by increasing the standard cash award to $3,000.

The new bounty for vulnerabilities in Firefox, Firefox Mobile and Thunderbird is also six times the normal payment by Google for flaws in its Chrome browser, and more than double the maximum $1,337 that Google pays for the most severe bugs. Mozilla and Google are the only browser makers that pay security researchers for reporting vulnerabilities in their products.

“A lot has changed in the six years since the Mozilla program was announced, and we believe that one of the best ways to keep our users safe is to make it economically sustainable for security researchers to do the right thing when disclosing information,” said Lucas Adamski, director of security engineering. Mozilla kicked off its bounty program in August 2004 .

Only bugs that Mozilla ranks “crucial” or “high” — its top two ratings — are eligible for payment. In Mozilla’s hierarchy, critical vulnerabilities are those that allow remote code execution; in other words, ones that when exploited give the attacker full control of the machine. High vulnerabilities are those that expose “high-value” personal information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card numbers. Denial-of-service flaws are not eligible for a bounty, Mozilla said.

It’s a big increase too going from $500 all the way to $3000 which is more than double what Google offers for the most critical & clever bugs ($1337). You could earn a decent living if you could find one Mozilla bug a month, especially if you already have a stable monthly salary.

I doubt anyone would be able to find so many bugs, and even if they did it’s still way below the market rate for a real, remotely exploitable 0-day exploit.

I still think it’s a good initiative though and they’ve raised the bounty to make it a more viable option for security researchers to submit vulnerabilities directly to them.

Google launched its own cash-for-flaws program in January 2010, paying $500 for most bugs. Some vulnerabilities, however, earn their discoverer $1,000, or even $1,337, the latter given only to bugs that Chrome’s team judge’s “particularly severe or particularly clever.” The last time Google paid bounties was July 2, when it handed out $2,500 to a pair of researchers for reporting four vulnerabilities.

Adamski announced several other changes to Mozilla’s bounty program on the Mozilla security blog Thursday. Bugs in the Mozilla Suite, which the Mozilla Foundation dropped in 2005 — will no longer be eligible for bounties, said Adamski. But vulnerabilities in Firefox Mobile, Mozilla’s mobile browser, as well as any Mozilla services that Firefox or Thunderbird rely on for safe operation, are eligible.

Mozilla also added new language to its reward policy that gives it some new flexibility. “Mozilla reserves the right to not give a bounty payment if we believe the actions of the reporter have endangered the security of Mozilla’s end users,” the revised guidelines now state.

They do say in the statement that if you were paid to find the flaw (e.g. by your company as a security researcher) they would prefer if you didn’t apply for the bounty so they can award the money to people working independently.

So if any of you guys find any interesting flaws in Mozilla products, $3000 might be waiting for you!

Source: Network World

Seems like Pwn2Own is getting a reputation for uncovering some pretty nasty browser based vulnerabilities, once again this year Firefox, Safari and IE8 were all broken wide open. The latest development is Mozilla has beaten both Microsoft and Apple to the punch and released Firefox 3.6.3 patching the vulnerability.

Again it was a critical vulnerability and the creator netted himself $10,000 from the contest for the exploit. Pretty fast patching from Firefox though with an 8 day turnaround, and the vulnerability is only on Firefox 3.6.x not 3.5.x in its current state.

Mozilla late yesterday patched a critical Firefox vulnerability used by a German researcher to win $10,000 for hacking the open-source browser at last week’s Pwn2Own contest.

In a repeat of 2009, Mozilla was the first browser maker to patch a bug exploited at Pwn2Own. In fact, the company improved on its performance by fixing the newest flaw only eight days after Nils, a researcher who works for U.K.-based MWR InfoSecurity, hacked Firefox. Last year, Mozilla took 10 days to come up with its Pwn2Own fix. Nils also successfully exploited Firefox at 2009′s contest.

This time, Nils used a memory corruption flaw to hack the browser, Mozilla said in the security advisory that accompanied the update to Firefox 3.6.3. It rated the bug as “critical,” the highest threat ranking in its four-step scoring system.

Nils exploited Firefox 3.6.2 — Mozilla had patched the browser just two days before the contest kicked off — on 64-bit Windows 7 , also bypassing the operating system’s DEP (data execution prevention) and ASLR (address space layout randomization) defenses. For his work, Nils was awarded $10,000 by 3Com TippingPoint, Pwn2Own’s sponsor.

Gotta give him some props though, exploiting the latest version of Firefox and bypassing both DEP and ASLR. Nice work Nils! It just goes to shows, if the motivation is there (which it is for many blackhats) then an entry vector can be found.

Especially with the rapid pace of software development in the web era, there’s no way everything can be kept secure with all the additional features and functions that are constantly being added.

Other researchers hacked Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) to also win $10,000 each.

According to Mozilla, Nils’ exploit only works against Firefox 3.6, the newest edition, but the company said it planned to also patch Firefox 3.5 “just in case there is an alternate way of triggering the bug.” Mozilla did not specify a timeline for the Firefox 3.5 update. Firefox 3.5 was just patched last Monday to bring it to version 3.5.9.

Mozilla restricted access to additional information on the vulnerability by locking down Bugzilla, its change- and bug-tracking database, allowing only authorized users to view information on the flaw. That move is typical of Mozilla when it has patched some, but not all, of its browsers.

Neither Apple or Microsoft has announced plans to patch their Pwn2Own vulnerabilities. Microsoft has acknowledged receiving details of the IE8 vulnerabilities that Dutch researcher Peter Vreugdenhil used to hack the browser, but earlier this week said a patch was not ready.

Microsoft as usual have stated it is still ‘under investigation’ having just patched 10 vulnerabilities in IE8 last week, they now have another to add to the list. I’m not holding my breath for an out-of-band patch however.

Mozilla also made the move to lock the public out of the vulnerability details on Bugzilla to prevent it from getting into the wild.

No news from Apple yet on the Safari bug, wonder when they’ll come out with a fix for it? Or acknowledge it even? Or perhaps they’ve already fixed it and pushed out the patch..who knows?

Source: Network World

This is an interesting development, I noticed the pop-up on my Firefox yesterday. The reason however wasn’t security it was ‘instability’.

It’s a fair move by Mozilla though as the add-on can cause security vulnerabilities in Firefox outside of their control. They can’t fix the software, so the best thing they can do to ensure user safety is to block it.

Compounded with the fact it’s extremely hard for users to remove the add-on themselves the block is a good idea.

Mozilla late Friday blocked the Microsoft-made software that had put Firefox users at risk from attack.

The two-part Microsoft component — an add-on dubbed “.NET Framework Assistant” and a plug-in named “Windows Presentation Foundation” — have been blocked by Mozilla as a precautionary measure, said Mike Shaver, the company’s head of engineering.

“Because of the difficulties some users have had entirely removing the add-on, and because of the severity of the risk it represents if not disabled, we contacted Microsoft today to indicate that we were looking to disable the extension and plug-in for all users via our blocklisting mechanism,” Shaver said in an announcement posted Friday night to the company’s security blog .

The annoying thing is these add-ons are installed in Firefox without any kind of prompt or permission given by the user.

Microsoft pushed them out with the .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1) update in February this year, so our browsers have been vulnerable since then.

The software was almost impossible to remove without some registry hacking, Microsoft did remedy this later – but still how many people would know?

Mozilla maintains an add-on/plug-in blocking list that automatically bars risky software from being used by Firefox. The open-source company first used the blocker in 2007. Mozilla has used the tool only nine times, including Friday’s blocking of the Microsoft add-on and plug-in. In May 2008, for example, Mozilla added a Vietnamese language pack for Firefox to the blocking list when the pack was found to contain a worm.

According to Shaver, Microsoft gave Mozilla the go-ahead to block the .Net Framework Assistant and the Windows Presentation Foundation.

Last week, Microsoft’s security team acknowledged that its software — which had been silently installed in Firefox as far back as February 2009 — contained a critical vulnerability that could be used by hackers to hijack Windows PCs. The same vulnerability also affected all versions of Internet Explorer (IE), including the newest version, IE8.

Thankfully Firefox has the blocklist functionality and they have been aggressively moving towards ensuring 3rd party additions are also secure and don’t comprise the integrity of the platform.

Last month they warned users with out of date Flash plugins to update.

Firefox 3.6 will be even more aggressive in this aspect warning users when they visit a site that relies on one or more outdated add-ons.

Source: Network World

Ah a bug in our beloved Firefox, after the latest 3.5 update (which sees some definite improvements).

The last one I recall was the Clickjacking Vulnerability, which also effected Chrome.

It seems like it’s not too serious of an issue and will only cause crashing, there’s no room for remote exploitation or code execution. So it may be an annoyance, but if it’s true – it’s not that serious.

Mozilla is denying that a bug that crashes Firefox 3.5 is a security vulnerability, countering earlier reports that the company’s latest browser contained a flaw even though it had just been patched.

In a Sunday post to Mozilla’s security blog, Mike Shaver, the company’s vice president of engineering, said that the bug, which had originally been disclosed on the milw0rm hacker site, is not a vulnerability. “The reports by press and various security agencies have incorrectly indicated that this is an exploitable bug,” Shaver said. “Our analysis indicates that it is not, and we have seen no example of exploitability.”

Exploit code hit milw0rm last Wednesday. Firefox developers immediately logged the bug into Bugzilla, Mozilla’s change- and bug-tracking database. The bug, continued Shaver, does crash Firefox 3.5 — and the recently-released 3.5.1 — in some situations. But there’s no way for an attacker to exploit that by injecting malicious code on the machine. The bug can crash Windows, Mac and Linux editions of Firefox, including Firefox when it’s being run on the still-unfinished Windows 7.

I guess they will fix it soon enough in the next release (3.5.2) which should come along fairly shortly. I’d have to say I believe the Mozilla developers if they say it’s not exploitable.

So it’s not too big of an issue to worry about, just wait for the next patch roll out and you should be saved from any random crashes caused by malicious sites.

Both Shaver in his blog post and developers on Bugzilla noted that the Firefox crash on Macs was due to a flaw in Apple’s operating system, specifically the ATSUI system library. “We have reported this issue to Apple, but in the event that they do not provide a fix we will look to implement mitigations in Mozilla code,” Shaver said.

Mozilla developer Vladimir Vukicevic countered that it was unlikely Apple would fix the problem. “We’ve reported this and similar bugs in the past to Apple; they have so far had no interest in fixing such bugs in their font rendering subsystems, especially if they’re in ATSUI and not CoreText,” said Vukicevic on Bugzilla.

Another Mozilla hand suggested that the Mac OS X bug may affect other browsers as well. “Chances are more applications use the same buggy API (Safari? Chrome?),” Andreas Gal said. Gal, a project scientist at the University of California-Irvine, was a key contributor to the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine that Mozilla added to Firefox with Version 3.5.

Just last Thursday, Mozilla patched Firefox 3.5 for the first time, issuing a fix for a critical vulnerability in TraceMonkey’s just-in-time (JIT) compiler. In the run-up to creating a fix for that flaw, Mozilla developers speculated that the hacker had dug through Bugzilla to find information that helped him exploit the vulnerability.

I’ve said for quite a while that open source is a double edged sword, especially when resources such as Bugzilla are public and allow people with malicious intent to dig through the archives and look for bugs that could be exploitable.

With the code being open and the bugs being open too, it makes it much easier to develop exploits.

Thankfully it also leads to less bugs and them being fixed faster, I know which I prefer any day.

You can find the exploit on milw0rm here:

Firefox 3.5 unicode stack overflow

Source: Network World

Just remember that even though Firefox tends to be more secure than Internet Exploder – it’s not immune from vulnerabilities (although they do tend to get fixed much much faster).

The latest one that’s cropped up in both Firefox and Chrome is a clickjacking vulnerability. This is basically where a link is replaced by an attacker to lead to a site (which would usually be setup to deliver malware).

You can find the Proof of Concept (PoC) here.

Security researchers have discovered a flaw affecting Google’s Chrome browser that exposes it to “clickjacking”–in which an attacker hijacks a browser’s functions by substituting a legitimate link with one of the attacker’s choice.

Google has acknowledged the flaw and is working toward a patch for Chrome versions 1.0.154.43 and earlier when running within Windows XP SP2 systems, according to SecNiche security researcher Aditya Sood.

Sood disclosed the flaw on Tuesday and has since posted a proof of concept on the Bugtraq vulnerability disclosure forum.

“Attackers can trick users into performing actions which the users never intended to do and there is no way of tracing such actions later, as the user was genuinely authenticated on the other page,” Sood said within the disclosure.

While Google is working on a fix, a representative for the Australian arm of the company pointed out that clickjacking can affect all browsers, not just Chrome.

I’m pretty sure there has been an Internet Explorer Clickjacking bug going around recently too. There was something with IE8 and apparently the ‘fix’ didn’t even help much.

So as always be cautious with what you’re clicking, and if you are super Paranoid just turn off all Javascript.

If you are even more paranoid…just go back to using Lynx on the command line :)

Either way it’s a fairly new brand of vulnerability so I’m sure it will be developed into a more complex and perhaps damaging variation.

However, Nishad Herath, an independent security researcher and CEO of Australian security consultancy Novologica, told ZDNet.com.au that after running Sood’s proof of concept he found that Internet Explorer 8 (release candidate 1 and beta 2 versions) and Opera 9.63 (the latest version) were not exposed to the flaw. But, like Chrome, Firefox 3.0.5 was exposed.

Google’s security researchers had not found any attacks in the wild that exploited the specific vulnerability, said Google’s representative.

Clickjacking is a relatively new browser attack that security researchers Robert Hansen and Jeremiah Grossman gave a talk on it late last year at the Open Web Application Security Project security conference in New York. Such an attack broadly fits within the category of cross-site scripting forgery, where an attacker uses maliciously crafted HTML or JavaScript code to force a victim’s browser to send an HTTP request to a Web site of their choosing.

“Clickjacking means that any interaction you have with a Web site you’re on, for example like clicking on a link, may not do what you expect it to do,” explained Herath.

I’d except Firefox to come out with an updated version pretty soon patched against this vulnerability, I’m not so sure about the release cycle of Chrome but I’d be surprised if Google let this slide.

It’ll be interesting to watch how far this goes.

Source: Cnet (Thanks Navin)

It seems a data leakage bug has struck Firefox recently and has been confirmed by Window Snyder the security bod at Mozilla.

It’s basically a Chrome directory traversal bug (It seems a lot of the Firefox issues have had to do with chrome?).

It’s rated as low risk, but it can give away the existence of files (if the attacker knows the name and location).

The bug resides in Firefox’s chrome protocol scheme and allows for a directory traversal when certain types of extensions are installed. Attackers could use it to detect if certain programs or files are present on a machine, gaining information to use in perpetrating another, more malicious exploit.

Normally, Firefox’s chrome package is restricted to a limited number of directories, but a bug in the way it handles escaped sequences (i.e. %2e%2e%2f) allows attackers to escape those confines and access more sensitive parts of a user’s computer. The exploit only works if a user has made use of Firefox extensions that are “flat,” this is, those that don’t package their files in a jar archive. Examples of flat add-ons include Download Statusbar and Greasemonkey.

You can protect yourself by using NoScript, which I would guess most of you guys are using already.

The open bug can be found here.

Source: The Register

Our Polish friend and expert security researcher, Michal Zalewski (lcamtuf), known for his endless stream of vulnerabilities in all manners of software, has struck again.

This time with some pretty serious flaws in both Internet Exploder Explorer and Firefox. This time it’s 4, 2 in IE and 2 in Firefox.

The first which effects fully patched IE6 and IE7 is pretty serious and can result in cookie theft, cooking setting, page hijacking or memory corruption.

It’s based on a page update Race Condition (aka bait and switch vuln).

When Javascript code instructs MSIE6/7 to navigate away from a page that meets same-domain origin policy (and hence can be scriptually accessed and modified by the attacker) to an unrelated third-party site, there is a window of opportunity for concurrently executed Javascript to perform actions with the permissions for the old page, but actual content for the newly loaded page

The demo can be found here:

http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/ierace/

The more serious of the two Firefox flaws is marked MAJOR and not CRITICAL and deals with the way the browser handles IFRAMEs (Cross-site IFRAME hijacking)

Javascript can be used to inject malicious code, including key-snooping event handlers, on pages that rely on IFRAMEs to display contents or store state data / communicate with the server.

A demo can be found here:

http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/ifsnatch/

The full e-mail with details of his vulnerabilities can be found here:

[Full-disclosure] Assorted browser vulnerabilities

You can also read more at The Register or eWeek.

Grab the new Firefox now, 2.0.0.1! 8 Security Vulnerabilities have been fixed in this last release of the year 2006.

I’m glad to see Firefox upholding their quick turnaround and rapid fixing of issues that spring up during development and improvement of their product.

Mozilla has released the first update for the Firefox 2.0 browser to fix eight security vulnerabilities.

According to the company, release 2.0.0.1 of Firefox fixes flaws in memory corruption as well as the way the browser executes RSS (really simple syndication), Javascript and CSS (cascading style sheets) code, among other vulnerabilities. Mozilla also patched similar flaws in its Firefox 1.5 browser.

Five of the eight flaws were rated as critical, according to Firefox. A critical rating means a Firefox user would be vulnerable to attack and remote software installation on their machines just from browsing the Web in the usual fashion. Two of the flaws were rated as high, while one received a low security-risk rating, Firefox said.

Mozilla’s advisory and information on the update can be found on the company’s Web site.

Danish security firm Secunia ApS also posted information about the patches on its Web site.

Source: Infoworld