Russian security firm Intevydis has made a Windows exploit for a previously unknown security hole in Firefox 3.6 available to its customers. The exploit allows attackers to remotely gain control of a PC. Intevydis develops the commercial VulnDisco add-on for the also commercial Canvas exploit toolkit by vendor Immunity. On the Immunity forum, developer Evgeny Legerov praises his exploit for Windows XP (SP3) and Vista as being quite reliable. The developer says It was an interesting challenge to find the flaw – a buffer overflow – and to exploit it.

While the post dates back to the beginning of February, the hole is likely to remain open since no updates have been released for Firefox 3.6 so far. Secunia rates the problem as critical, but hasn't provided any further information in its advisories and the Mozilla Foundation has become aware of the problem, but has yet to release an official statement. Whether the exploit has already been widely circulated or used on a large scale remains unknown. However, according to the analysis on the Extraexploit blog, a significant increase in the number of Firefox 3.6 crashes was noted on the 12th and 13th of February. It is unclear whether the crashes were connected to the exploit being tested. The pages causing the highest number of crashes are listed in Mozilla's crash reports.

In passing, Legerov also mentions zero day exploits for Lotus Notes 8.5/8.5fp1 and for RealPlayer 11. The exploit for RealPlayer is the modernised version of an exploit that appeared two years ago for a hole that RealPlayer closed only recently.

See also:

Eleven vulnerabilities in RealPlayer fixed, a report from The H.

Critical vulnerability in RealPlayer, a report from The H.

(crve)