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On Saturday, Mischa Spiegelmock and Andrew Wbeelsoi told attendees at the ToorCon event in San Diego that Firefox is
But Spiegelmock has now backpedaled on those claims. In a statement provided to Mozilla, which coordinates development of Firefox, Spiegelmock said that the computer code displayed during the presentation does not fully compromise a PC running the browser.
"I have not succeeded in making this code do anything more than cause a crash and eat up system resources, and I certainly haven't used it to take over anyone else's computer and execute arbitrary code," he wrote in the statement, which was
"The main purpose of our talk was to be humorous," Spiegelmock wrote. "I apologize to everyone involved, and I hope I have made everything as clear as possible."
He pinned the claim that the hackers know of 30 yet-to-be-fixed flaws in Firefox entirely on his co-presenter, Wbeelsoi. "I have no undisclosed Firefox vulnerabilities. The person who was speaking with me made this claim, and I honestly have no idea if he has them or not," Spiegelmock wrote. Wbeelsoi could not immediately be reached for comment.
Video:
Hackers claim Firefox zero-day flaw
Is the browser more vulnerable than thought?
Video:
Hackers vs. Firefox
Mozilla antsy about expolited Firefox flaws.
The presentation at
"At this point, Mischa is cooperating with us, and we're pleased that he has decided to work with us, but we're disappointed that so many people were spun up about this," she said. "It is an expensive operation in terms of resources and the individuals who lost time with their families over the weekend."
Based on the information Spiegelmock provided to Mozilla, the issue presented at ToorCon could still be a serious flaw, but so far, it looks like an innocuous crash, Snyder said. "We've got a potential issue, but at this point it is essentially a reliability issue. We have not been able to demonstrate code execution," she said.
In his statement, Spiegelmock wrote that the presentation included "a previously known Firefox vulnerability." Snyder, however, said that the potential issue is similar to an old bug, but is different.
"What they presented was a potential vulnerability," Snyder said. "Whenever you see a crash you want to investigate it completely, to evaluate whether or not there is any security impact. We have not exhausted all the options, so we're going to work on it...The right thing for Firefox users is to take it seriously and not dismiss anything."
Another security expert said the issue is nothing more than something that would cause Firefox to crash. "The test case from their slides is merely an out-of-memory crash bug and not a vulnerability,"
Snyder couldn't say whether Mozilla would issue a patch to fix the reliability issue and potential vulnerability, or address it in a future release of the browser. "I can't say at this point, it requires further investigation," she said.
See more CNET content tagged:
Mischa Spiegelmock,
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*source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-day
"Zero-Day exploits are released before, or on the same day the vulnerability ? and, sometimes, the vendor patch ? are released to the public. The term derives from the number of days between the public advisory and the release of the exploit."
So it's not one when the software was released. I think the part you confused on was the first paragraph
"Zero day or 0day refers to software, videos, music, or information unlawfully released or obtained on the day of public release. Items obtained pre-release are sometimes labeled Negative day or -day. Zero-day software, videos, and music usually have been either illegally obtained or illegally copied."
Which uses Zero day in a different context from the one it's being used in this article.
"Zero-Day exploits are released before, or on the same day the vulnerability ? and, sometimes, the vendor patch ? are released to the public."
In this case, the supposed exploit code was released before a vendor patch, hence the term zero-day.
Joris
CNET News.com
What a waste of time.
Monumental. Waste. Of. Time.
hackers are nothing more than publicity seekers who cannot be
trusted. They're almost as bad as the truly malicious criminal
hackers and scammers and in someways go out of their way to be
helpful to the bad guys.
But for now , the conspiracy theorists have been given enough little tidbits, to starting pointing the bone with a vengence!
Oh well, the witch hunt has now only just begun!
That dragon breath of flame of blame, will now be ramped up to next level of the extreme heat of the sun's core, and those that cried wolf will become instant charcoal!
Anyone can get the source. SO if a flaw was found there is nothing mozilla can do about it.
Just like when flaws are found in windows, publishing details before hand, while frowned on, can't be stopped by MS.
If the exploit was real, then it would have been confirmed by a thrid party, if not mozilla.
http://www.toorcon.org/2006/conference.html
Looks like the exploits are there but the hackers were told to take back their comment to stop the panic.
Why not find out the issues and fix them instead of hiding them?
If there was exploitable code it would have been found, if not by mozilla, then by 3rd parties pouring over the source code.
Can't someone think about all the retards this is hurting?
LOL
An unexpoitable exploit is not an exploit... it's an attempt at exploitation.
Since when have attempts at exploitation been labelled Zero-Day Flaws or Zero-Day attacks when such attacks are not even possible?
Thus in the future I recommend that CNET have the proclaiming hackers to show CNET their exploit and confirm that it is in fact an exploit prior to bringing the story to print as an exploit.
Walt