Qatar Cyber Chiefs Warn on Mozilla RCE Bugs

The National Cyber Security Agency in Qatar is warning Adobe users to urgently apply patches following the disclosure of vulnerabilities in Mozilla’s Firefox and Thunderbird, but did not mention other affected browsers.

The vulnerability (CVE-2023-4863, CVSS 8.8) is a critical heap buffer overflow in the WebP library that allows remote code execution, which affects three versions of Firefox and two Thunderbird releases. Other browsers that support this library, including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, and Apple Safari, are also affected; Google last week warned that the bug had been exploited in the wild as a zero day prior to patching. WebP allows webmasters and Web developers to create smaller, richer images to improve the user’s Web experience.

In a tweet, the Qatari agency recommended Mozilla browser users update, but didn’t mention the other affected platforms — despite the fact that statistics show that Firefox has less than 1% of the browser market share in Qatar, while around 70% of users in the country use Chrome. This could suggest that active attacks specifically against Mozilla have been seen in the wild in the region, but the agency did not immediately return a request for confirmation of that from Dark Reading.

“Mozilla’s advisory notes that exploitation in other software has been observed, but the advisory did not indicate that there had been successful attacks utilizing Firefox or Thunderbird,” says Scott Caveza, staff research engineer at Tenable. Caveza confirms that both Apple and Google noted that exploitation in the wild has been observed: In the case of Apple, the vulnerability has reportedly been utilized by the NSO Group.