Summary
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Mozilla has released security updates for Firefox and Thunderbird to fix a critical zero-day vulnerability that has been actively exploited in the wild.
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The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-4863, is a heap buffer overflow flaw in the WebP image format that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the victim’s computer.
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The vulnerability is suspected to target individuals who are at an elevated risk, such as activists, dissidents, and journalists.
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Mozilla has released Firefox 117.0.1, Firefox ESR 115.2.1, Firefox ESR 102.15.1, Thunderbird 102.15.1, and Thunderbird 115.2.2 to fix the vulnerability.
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Google has also released a fix for the vulnerability in Chrome.
Additional Details
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The WebP image format is a modern image format that is designed to be more efficient than other image formats, such as JPEG and PNG.
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The heap buffer overflow vulnerability occurs when Firefox or Thunderbird attempts to decode a specially crafted WebP image.
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The vulnerability could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the victim’s computer by tricking them into opening a malicious WebP image.
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Mozilla and Google have been working to fix the vulnerability since it was reported to them.
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The security updates have been released for all supported versions of Firefox and Thunderbird.
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Users are advised to update their browsers as soon as possible to protect themselves from this vulnerability.
Are there ways to test if a webp is malicious? Besides “Open it and see if you got infected”?
Clarification: I consider any file that causes this overflow as malicious, regardless if it carries code or not.