Vulnerability on Mozilla Firefox Targets Crypto Users

Vulnerability on Mozilla Firefox Targets Crypto Users

Firefox has assigned a critical to a vulnerability discovered by the security team at Coinbase and a security researcher at Google, Samuel D Gross. This attack has been used before in order to attack cryptocurrency users.

A zero-day vulnerability is a weakness in the computer software that is unknown or unaddressed by those who should be interested in mitigating the vulnerability. So, until the vulnerability is taken care of, hackers will be able to make use of the weakness to adversely impact computer data, programs a network or even additional computers.

Registered by experts under the code CVE-2019–11707, experienced a similar issue which occurred in the Mozilla Firefox browser three years ago in 2016. Firefox published a statement at the time which highlighted:

“A type confusion vulnerability can occur when manipulating Javascript objects due to issues in array.pop. this can allow for an exploitable crash. we are aware of targeted attacks in the wild abusing this flaw.”

A result of this critical threat was that all Firefox users had to update the latest version of Mozilla Firefox 67.0.3 in which the problem has been fixed. In these kinds of situations, the vulnerability is generally hidden from the public and fixed immediately before released publicly because of the potential harm with it.

In order to help improve the security in the crypto space, Firefox has made an announcement that all versions of its web browser in the future would automatically block crypto-jacking malware. The aim of this is to target the negative impacts of unchecked online tracking.

Web browsers for the future will protect users default from this and provide more users controls on a more advanced level for what information is shared with third parties.

As reported by Bitcoin News:

“In addition to blocking crypto-jacking malware, the initiative plans to prevent noticeable effects such as what it describes as ”eerily-specific targeted advertising”, as well as those that users are unable to spot such as unchecked data collection that can lead to major security breaches. Firefox cited a study that indicates a total of 55.4% of time spent loading a web page is actually spent sending information to third parties.”

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