Firefox faces serious security threat

by Brian Turner

IMPORTANT: Turned out this story was a fraud. There are no security flaws, and Six Apart – who sponsored the defamation – are trying to play the whole embarrassing mess down as a “prank”.

The increasingly popular Mozilla Firefox browser has been found to have a critical security flaw when handling Javascript.

Javascript is a scripting language commonly used on websites, such as for displaying content menus, login boxes, and recently within the new AJAX development language.

While previous flaws have been found in how Internet Explorer handles Javascript, this flaw is specific to how Firefox handles the scripting language.

Not only that, but according to one if it’s discovers, Mischa Spiegelmock, it would be impossible to patch – Mozilla would have to completely rewrite how it handles Javascript.

Mischa Spiegelmock also claims to have identified another 30 security flaws in Firefox, which is bound to be bad news for surfers who believe that Mozilla’s Firefox browser is safe to surf with.

However, despite the recent announcement and risk to users, sheer demographics show IE use is more prevalent, and therefore more likely to be targeted by malicious users.

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Posted in: Security