Security News

Mozilla on Thursday announced some changes to its Firefox bug bounty program, including bigger rewards and its decision to accept duplicate reports in some cases. The organization has been running a bug bounty program since 2004, and between 2017 and 2019 it paid out nearly $1 million for roughly 350 vulnerabilities.

Mozilla has released security updates for its Firefox browser in conjunction with a US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency advisory warning that critical vulnerabilities in the browser are being actively exploited. To address these flaws, Firefox was updated to version 74.0.1 and Firefox Extended Support Release - a slower evolving version for enterprises - was updated to 68.6.1.

Mozilla has released updates for its Firefox web browser to patch two critical use-after-free vulnerabilities that have been exploited in attacks. Both flaws have been addressed with the release of Firefox 74.0.1 and Firefox ESR 68.6.1.

Have you come up with hardware or software that can help solve a problem that arose from COVID-19 and its worldwide spread? Mozilla is offering up to $50,000 to open source technology projects that are responding to the pandemic in some way. Online "Hackatons" - launched/sponsored by governments and various organizations in Poland, Estonia, China, the UK, Switzerland, India, Malaysia, and so on - are gathering participants from different sectors and with different skills to collaborate and come up with IT-based open source solutions to COVID-19-related medical, social and other problems.

Mozilla is getting ready to remove support for the File Transfer Protocol from the Firefox web browser due to security concerns. The Internet giant aims to completely remove support for FTP in Chrome 82.

The patched version of Mozilla's browser, launched on Tuesday, is Firefox 73 and Firefox ESR 68.5. One of the vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2020-6800, was fixed in a previous release of Firefox 72 and the current Firefox ESR 68.5 update on Tuesday.

We're committed to completely eradicating weak versions of TLS because at Mozilla we believe that user security should not be treated as optional. Although not exactly a household name, TLS is the encryption protocol that makes several types of secure connection possible, including secure versions of SMTP, POP3, FTP and of, course, HTTP. For example, when a browser visits a site using HTTPS, TLS sets up authentication, the exchange of session keys, and agreement on cipher suites.

The nature of the banned extensions is difficult to say - Mozilla lists them on Bugzilla using only the IDs they used on addons. The hard ban on extensions that execute remote code seems to have happened around the time pre-release versions of Firefox 72 hove into view, but this was only noticed by some developers and users when the company abruptly banned several page translation extensions in November.

UPDATE. Both the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox teams are cracking down on web browser extensions that steal user data and execute remote code, among other bad actions. In this case, Google said that after becoming aware of a widespread pattern of pernicious behavior on the part of a large number of Chrome extensions, it has disabled extensions that contain a monetary component - those that are paid for, offer in-browser transactions and those that offer subscription services.

Mozilla has patched a Firefox zero-day vulnerability that is being exploited in attacks in the wild and is urging Firefox and Firefox ESR users to update their installations as soon as possible. A day after Mozilla released Firefox 72 - which blocks fingerprinting scripts by default for all users, replaces annoying notification request pop-ups from various sites with a speech bubble in the address bar, and fixes a number of security issues - the corporation pushed out Firefox 72.0.1 with a fix for CVE-2019-17026, a type confusion vulnerability in IonMonkey, the JavaScript Just-In-Time compiler for Mozilla's JavaScript engine.