I was updating one of my blogs and became really frustrated because every time I previewed the post the Firefox crashed and I had to start from all over again. Previously I thought it was because of the script used to displaying a swf file so I removed it from the post – I even deleted the post – but the problem still there. I deactivated the plugins one buy one but this also didn’t solve my problem. Three days ago I didn’t find any problem with my this blog so I actually doubted if it was due to the plugins.

I tried another blog only to find the same problem. All of my blogs have similar set up but this Firefox problem affected only two of my blogs. After several hours looking for remedies I landed on this page and confirmed that it was the Firefox problem and they haven’t found the solution yet!

Below is the announcement made by Mozilla on Sept 9, 2009:

Description

Mozilla developers and community members identified and fixed several stability bugs in the browser engine used in Firefox and other Mozilla-based products. Some of these crashes showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances and we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code.

Workaround

Disable JavaScript

until a version containing these fixes can be installed. Ouch ……….

Too bad for me because Firefox has been my preferred browser and I never had a serious issue before. Now before they solve the problem I have to get myself going with Opera which I downloaded two days ago.

Here’s how you can disable the JavaScript from your Firefox browser:

Hopefully this Firefox problem can be fixed as soon as possible. Now I have to tell my blog readers about this problem because I noticed a significant drop of visitors on one of my blog. Most of them came to my blog via Firefox ….

Rudi

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My concern is not about the WordPress loophole actually. Network security threats can possibly be found in any platforms or programs and we might not realize they exist until somebody publicly tells us. I personally would be very happy to receive this information only from the vendors or developers – WordPress developers in this case – rather than receiving it from other people, unfortunately words already spread and people know nothing about internet coding can only hope nobody will attack their blogs while waiting for WordPress to fix this issue.

A blog author explained this WordPress vulnerability in one article of his blog, how to put it in practice and showed some examples of the results on sites he didn’t own. While the author mentioned that it was just a proof-of-concept most of the blog readers didn’t agree and put a lot of flames in the comment section. I don’t know what the author has in his mind, but if he did it to pull some comments to the blog by throwing a controversial issue then I have to admit his method worked. He got the comments with a lot of chili, scorn and flames mixed together. I guess people looked at this issue from different point of views, most of them got irritated because by that time no real solution was provided while the WordPress security issue has been publicly made. Only a small portion of them thanked the author for raising the issue.

In my opinion the better way to address the network security threats is to inform the software or websites developers / owners first. Let them take action and fix the problems before spreading the news. If no solution is provided and you have the solution you can help the community by giving the solution. You will get the rewards this way because you are providing solution to your blog readers. People would love to revisit your blog to find valuable contents.

Just my 2 cents,

- Rudi

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