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Firefox 1.5 exploit code released

Posted by tadelste on · 1 comment
TechSpot; By Derek Sooman
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Already Firefox 1.5, the latest incarnation of the popular alternative browser, has had exploit code released which takes advantage of a bug in the history.dat file, which stores information from Web sites users have visited. Basically, using an overly long topic of a page can cause the browser to crash each time it is started after going to such a page. According to the Internet Storm Center, it is not possible to start Firefox normally until the history.dat file is manually erased.

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Comments (1)

This is a let-down from two points of view.

What with all of the new code in it and full source availability, you'd expect a malcontent to be able to come up with a far more intricate and destructive "exploit" than that. They really can't be trying if this is the nastiest they've achieved.

OTOH having a bug as simple and obvious as this -- effectively a buffer overflow -- hanging around after all of this time and all of this practice at robust coding is a bit startling too.

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