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 While
nothing is perfect, Mozilla's Firefox Web browser may be close to
it. The newest improvement: The Mozilla Foundation has released
an update, Firefox 1.0.1, to their browser to fix several vulnerabilities,
including one that would protect against spoofed domains.
Among other bugs, the updated Firefox 1.0.1 was equipped to fix
a vulnerability in the Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), a standard
for handling special character sets in the domain names that allow
companies to register domain names that appear to be the same in
different languages. The update will display IDN coding in the address
bar to prevent spoofing.
The IDN Vulnerability
The vulnerability allowed an attacker to pull off a phishing
scam by creating a fake Web site on a non-Microsoft browser.
Phishing scams try to fool consumers into handing over-sensitive
or personal information by creating legitimate-looking Web sites
and e-mail messages. Instead of taking a user to what they believe
is a trusted site, the spoofed URL leads them to a fake site with
a domain rendered as the same address under the IDN process.
That's where the update comes in. In defense of such an occurrence,
Firefox 1.0.1 will display the IDN Punycode -- the encoding of Unicode
strings into the limited character set supported by the Domain Name
System and IDN -- in the address bar and prevent false URLs.
The update is available at Mozilla.org
for the following operating systems:
Firefox's Rapid Progression
It's updates such as this that make Firefox so popular among users.
In fact, the
Mozilla Foundation celebrated 25 million downloads of its browser,
a landmark achieved in just 100 days. This makes Firefox a more
than worthy and capable competitor of Microsoft's virus-ridden Internet
Explorer.
Mozilla's free 1.0 program was released in November 2004; an average
of 250,000 people download Firefox every day.
CNET
News February 24, 2005
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