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Users of Mozilla Firefox are vulnerable to phishing attacks because the pop-up dialogue box for password entry in the latest version of the web browser can be spoofed, a leading security researcher has warned.

Aviv Raff claims a vulnerability in the way that Firefox displays authentication dialogs allows cyber criminals to obtain username and password information by deceiving users into thinking they are giving their details to a reliable source.

In an advisory, he wrote: “Mozilla Firefox allows spoofing the information presented in the basic authentication dialog box. This can allow an attacker to conduct phishing attacks by tricking the user to believe that the authentication dialog box is from a trusted website.”

Mr Raff has posted a video on the popular video sharing website YouTube to show how criminals can exploit the vulnerability and he is urging Firefox users not to provide any usernames and passwords to any sites using the basic pop-up dialogue box method of authentication.

Last month Mr Raff highlighted a security loophole in Google’s Toolbar browser utility that allowed phishers to spoof a URL in a dialog box that popped up when users tried to download new toolbar buttons.

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Microsoft warned companies on Monday that a flaw in the way Windows searches for Web proxies could allow an attacker the ability to reroute traffic through a malicious server.

The security issues occur when a Windows computer attempts to find a proxy server using Microsoft’s Web Proxy Automatic Discovery (WPAD) technology and the organization’s domain name starts at the third level or deeper, such as somecompany.co.jp, the software giant stated in an advisory. The WPAD search first attempts to find the server using the fully-qualified domain name (FQDN), and if it doesn’t find the server will try the next higher level of the domain name. For example, a search for a proxy server in somecompany.co.jp will look for servername.somecompany.co.jp and then move on to servername.co.jp, which could be a malicious server outside the company’s network.

“At this time, we are not aware of attacks attempting to use the reported vulnerability, but we will continue to track this issue,” Tim Rains, a spokesman for the Microsoft Security Response Center, said on the teams’ blog. “The advisory contains several mitigations that customers can use to help protect themselves from attackers.”

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Trojans have topped threat lists during the first six months of the year, according to a new report.

Security firm BitDefender Labs says that Trojans were the most popular form of malicious threat in the first half of 2007, along with mass mailers.

The Netsky worm also continued to keep its place in the top ten threat list, with all of the malware in the table accounting for two-thirds of total web viruses.

Viorel Canja, head of BitDefender Labs, called the shift from viruses to Trojans ‘an interesting trend’.

‘Although the popularity of mass mailers is slowly receding, variants are still present and pose a very real risk to computer systems used by consumers and small businesses,’ he added.

A recent report from information security services provider SecureWorks revealed that the number of hackers targeting banking institutions has soared by 81 per cent since 2006, with attackers using the Gozi, Prg and BBB Trojans in particular.

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