Phishing vulnerability identified in Mozilla

By Simon Aughton

Posted on 14 Jun 2004 at 17:09

A security vulnerability has been discovered in the Windows versions of the Mozilla and Firefox Web browsers.

A Secunia Advisory 11856 says, 'A weakness has been reported in Mozilla, allowing malicious people to conduct phishing attacks. The weakness is caused due to an error within the handling of URLs. This can be exploited to potentially trick users into supplying sensitive information to a malicious web site, because information displayed in the address bar can be constructed in a certain way, which may lead users to believe that they're visiting another web site than the displayed web site.'

The flaw can only be exploited if a malicious site's domain supports wildcard DNS and accepts invalid values in the 'Host:' header.

The vulnerability has been confirmed in Mozilla 1.6 and 1.7rc3 and Firefox 0.8 and 0.9rc for Windows. Other versions may also be affected. It is rated 'less critical'.

Secunia advises that users of these browsers do not follow links from untrusted sources and input URLs manually in the address bar.