Firefox likely to win race to fix PWN2OWN contest bug

Unless its two biggest rivals take extraordinary steps, Mozilla Corp. will be the first browser maker to patch a critical vulnerability used a week ago to win US$5,000 in a hacking contest.

At the PWN2OWN competition last Thursday, a computer science student from Germany who would only give his first name as Nils cracked a Sony laptop running Windows 7 by exploiting a previously unknown bug in Microsoft Corp.'s new Internet Explorer 8 (IE8). Nils quickly followed that hack with two more, of Apple Inc.'s Safari and Mozilla's Firefox, both running on a MacBook.

For each successful exploit, Nils was paid $5,000 -- a total of $15,000 -- by contest sponsor 3Com Corp.'s TippingPoint. He also was awarded the Sony Viao notebook for being the first researcher to hack the machine.

By the rules of PWN2OWN, researchers are not allowed to divulge details of their vulnerabilities and exploits, but instead sign over the rights to both to TippingPoint, which in turn reports the bugs to the appropriate vendor.

Earlier today, Mozilla's director of security engineering, Lucas Adamski, told IDG News reporter Robert McMillan that Firefox would be patched against a critical vulnerability that had been disclosed on the milw0rm.com site yesterday.

Later in the day, Mozilla added that it would also fix the bug Nils revealed. "Both issues have been investigated and fixes have been developed which are now undergoing quality assurance testing," the company announced in a post to its security blog this afternoon. "These fixes will be included in the upcoming Firefox 3.0.8 release, due to be released by April 1."

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