Software bugs

The bMighty Blog describes how a bug in Firefox which was present in the 2.x series and was in the 3.0 released version has created some controversy: did the security researcher know about the bug earlier and choose the timing of the announcement purely for the publicity?

In other words, this is an issue that could have surfaced at any point in the past two or three years — but did not. Instead, news of the bug surfaced just five hours into biggest, and perhaps most important, software launch in Mozilla’s history.

The article goes on to describe various possible motivations for timing a security announcement with a highly publicised major release: it might benefit the researcher, but it also hurts Mozilla a lot. This is hostile bug reporting at its finest, if it wasn’t a coincidence.

Popularity: 51% [?]

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 22nd, 2008 at 3:40 am and is filed under Security bug reporting.