Firefox open to Windows cursor attack
Mozilla’s Firefox 2.0 is vulnerable to attackers armed with the Windows animated (ANI) cursor exploit, that yesterday (3 March) promoted Microsoft to rush out an emergency patch.
Alexander Sotirov, the vulnerability researcher at Determina who discovered the ANI flaw last December and notified Microsoft of it later that month, yesterday posted a demonstration of an ANI exploit that hijacks a PC when Firefox users are conned into visiting a malicious site.
“It turns out that Firefox uses the same vulnerable Windows component to process .ani files, which can be exploited in a way similar to Internet Explorer,” Sotirov said during the demo.
He showed how both IE7 and Firefox 2.0, when run on a Vista-powered PC, can be hijacked by an attack using the ANI exploit he created in December as a vulnerability proof-of-concept, which he also shared with Microsoft’s security team.
When the attack was run against IE 7, the ANI exploit gave access to all files on the system. “However, we cannot alter any system files” because of IE’s protected mode, which is enabled by default in Vista, said Sotirov.
Vista’s version of IE7 runs in a low-privilege mode — dubbed “protected mode” by Microsoft — that blocks disk write access to all but a temporary files folder.
