Netscape flaw exposes hard drives
Poster: Aron Schatz
Posted on May 1, 2002 at 2:48:32 PM
An Israeli software firm has discovered a flaw in Netscape and Mozilla software that allows code hidden in a Web page to read files from the user's PC. The bug is a more serious variant of one patched in Microsoft's Internet Explorer in February.
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According to the report, verified by other developers, XMLHttpRequest doesn't properly check the security settings for some types of data requests in a Web page, allowing them, if properly disguised, to request data from the user's hard drive. The Internet Explorer bug required an attacker to know the name of a file on the user's PC in order to exploit that file, but the Mozilla bug also allows the contents of directories on the local drive to be listed.
GreyMagic Software report
There is no patch for this yet.
[PAGEBREAK]
According to the report, verified by other developers, XMLHttpRequest doesn't properly check the security settings for some types of data requests in a Web page, allowing them, if properly disguised, to request data from the user's hard drive. The Internet Explorer bug required an attacker to know the name of a file on the user's PC in order to exploit that file, but the Mozilla bug also allows the contents of directories on the local drive to be listed.
GreyMagic Software report
There is no patch for this yet.