Firefox flaw raises phishing fears

ZDNET ^ | 1/7/2005 | Ingrid Marson

[KwasiOwusu]

A vulnerability in Firefox could expose users of the open-source browser to the risk of phishing scams, security experts have warned.

The flaw in Mozilla Firefox 1.0, details of which were published by security company Secunia on Tuesday, allows malicious hackers to spoof the URL in the download dialog box that pops up when a Firefox user tries to download an item from a Web site. This flaw is caused by the dialog box incorrectly displaying long sub-domains and paths, which can be exploited to conceal the actual source of the download.

Mikko Hypponen, director of antivirus research at software maker F-Secure, said this bug could make Firefox users vulnerable to cybercriminals. "The most likely way we could see this exploited would be in phishing scams," he said.

To fall victim to such a scam, a Firefox user would have to click on a link in an e-mail that pointed to a spoofed Web site and then download malicious software from the site, which would appear to be downloaded from a legitimate site.

[antiRepublicrat]

BTW, look at it from the company's point of view. If Dell has a glitch that affects three minutes worth of orders during the holiday season, they have to deal with maybe 30 irate customers to try to find their orders, and a big company can easily afford that.

If Amazon's systems blew it for three minutes, their staff would be dealing with almost 6,000 irate customers looking for their stuff. That's a heavy load on any customer service department.

Obviously, higher traffic makes your systems critical in more ways than just transaction processing speed. It can have consequences that far outstrip the value of products affected by server problems.

[antiRepublicrat]

Now I applaud dell they are eating their own dog food, they sell mainly windows server so to runn *nix would be as embarassing

Since the anti-trust actions forced Microsoft to allow OEMs choice, Dell has been offering a lot of Linux for their systems, so that would be eating their own dog food too. OTOH, their Windows is obviously working well enough, and as the "shining star" of Windows installations, I'm sure they get a great licencing deal from Microsoft.

[N3WBI3]

Yea I know I bout a couple of PE 1700's running Linux for some web app clustering. What I have found is dells support of the redhat boxes is a joke. I mean to say they make most of their money selling windows servers so in that way they are eating thier own dog food..