Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Pop-up vulnerability found in major browsers

Filed under
Security

Several popular Web browsers contain a vulnerability that could be used by cybercriminals to steal personal data, security company Secunia has warned.

The flaw would allow a phishing attack in which a malicious JavaScript pop-up window appeared in front of a trusted Web site, Secunia said in an alert published Tuesday. This could trick a surfer into revealing data such as a password.

"The problem is that JavaScript dialog boxes do not display or include their origin, which allows a new window to open--for example, a prompt dialog box--which appears to be from a trusted site," said Secunia's advisory.

According to Secunia, the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Internet Explorer for Mac, Safari, iCab, Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox and Camino are all vulnerable. Opera 7 and 8 are affected, but not 8.01, according to Opera.

To take advantage of the flaw, a cybercriminal would have to direct a Web user from a malicious site to a genuine, trusted site such as an online bank, in a new browser window. The malicious site would then open a JavaScript dialog box in front of the trusted Web site, and a user might then be fooled into sending personal information back to the malicious site.

Microsoft has said it is investigating Secunia's claims. It encouraged surfers not to trust pop-up windows that don't include an address bar or a lock icon that verifies that it came from a certified source.

Mozilla Firefox developers have already been making moves to combat this kind of phishing attack. Back in April, a patch was developed that allows people to block Java and Flash-based pop-ups unless they came from trusted sites. Mozilla wasn't immediately available to comment on Secunia's claims.

Opera confirmed Wednesday that its latest browser, 8.01, would display the pop-up's origin, letting a user inspect its URL to see if it came from a trusted site.

"Once these things are discovered, there's a rush as everyone tries to fix the problem," Christen Krogh, Opera's vice president of engineering, told ZDNet UK.

Krogh also pointed out that Secunia had rated the vulnerability as "less critical."

"This could fool some users into giving out some data to a site that wouldn't otherwise be able to get that information. But it doesn't seem like the most important issue," Krogh said.

By Graeme Wearden
ZDNet UK

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.