Firefox vulnerability exposed as a hoax

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 04 October 2006 05:09

Your IT - Home IT

One of two hackers who got up on stage and gave a presentation detailing a so-called Javascript vulnerability in Firefox has come forward and admitted the presentation was a hoax.

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During a presentation at the Toorcon conference in San Diego last Saturday, young hackers Mischa Spiegelmock and Andrew Wbeelsoi detailed a vulnerability which they claimed was not able to be patched unless Mozilla rewrites key sections of its JavaScript code. The two hackers gave a detailed presentation on stage showing a slide with what was claimed to be key information on how a hacker could gain control of a computer which visits a web page containing malicious JavaScript code.

The hackers also claimed to have knowledge of a total of 30 Firefox exploits.
 
However, Spiegelmock has since issued a statement saying that presentation was meant to be a tongue-in-cheek humorous hoax. He has issued the following statement, which was posted on iTWire in the comments section of our previous story:

"The main purpose of our talk was to be humorous.
 
"As part of our talk we mentioned that there was a previously known Firefox vulnerability that could result in a stack overflow ending up in remote code execution. However, the code we presented did not in fact do this, and I personally have not gotten it to result in code execution, nor do I know of anyone who has.
 
"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.
 
"I do not have 30 undisclosed Firefox vulnerabilities, nor did I ever make this claim. 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.
 
"I apologize to everyone involved, and I hope I have made everything as clear as possible.
 
Sincerely,
Mischa Spiegelmock"

While, the open source community is currently expressing its annoyance at the childish actions of the two young pranksters, the Mozilla development team has indicated that it remains vigilant about the issues raised in the bogus presentation.
 
"Even though Mischa hasn’t been able to achieve code execution, we still take this issue seriously. We will continue to investigate," stated the leader of the Mozilla security team, Window Snyder.