What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2008-5508

• Severity: medium (CVSS 4.3 v2.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 2.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2008-12-17 · updated 2026-06-16
• Weakness: CWE-20

Description

Mozilla Firefox 3.x before 3.0.5 and 2.x before 2.0.0.19, Thunderbird 2.x before 2.0.0.19, and SeaMonkey 1.x before 1.1.14 does not properly parse URLs with leading whitespace or control characters, which might allow remote attackers to misrepresent URLs and simplify phishing attacks.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 6.06, 7.10, 8.04, 8.10
• Debian Linux: 4.0, 5.0
• Mozilla Firefox: from 2.0 before 2.0.0.19; from 3.0 before 3.0.5 — fixed in 2.0.0.19, 3.0.5
• Mozilla Seamonkey: from 1.0 before 1.1.14 — fixed in 1.1.14
• Mozilla Thunderbird: from 2.0 before 2.0.0.19 — fixed in 2.0.0.19

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.19, 3.0.5; Mozilla Seamonkey 1.1.14; Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.0.19. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://secunia.com/advisories/33184
• http://secunia.com/advisories/33188
• http://secunia.com/advisories/33189
• http://secunia.com/advisories/33203
• http://secunia.com/advisories/33204
• http://secunia.com/advisories/33205
• http://secunia.com/advisories/33216
• http://secunia.com/advisories/33231
• http://secunia.com/advisories/33408
• http://secunia.com/advisories/33415
• http://secunia.com/advisories/33421
• http://secunia.com/advisories/33433

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