Netscape 4.5 Local Process Termination Vulnerability
Moderate risk. Patch during routine maintenance and watch for changes in exploit activity.
An unauthenticated attacker, remotely over the network, can cause limited impact to integrity and availability.
talkback in Netscape 4.5 allows a local user to kill an arbitrary process of another user whose Netscape crashes.
Inferred from the weakness type (CWE) and how the flaw is reached — the techniques an attacker would chain to exploit this. Real-world corroboration appears here as threat intel is folded in.
Generated by Wavense from the CVE record — an immediate mitigation and the permanent fix.
Implement strict local access controls and user authentication to limit who can access the compromised system. Educate users about safe browsing practices to reduce the likelihood of Netscape 4.5 crashing, which is a prerequisite for exploitation. Actively monitor system logs for suspicious process termination events that could indicate an ongoing attack.
The permanent resolution is to upgrade Netscape Navigator to a version beyond 4.5 that addresses this specific vulnerability, such as Netscape Communicator 4.7x or later. Alternatively, migrate to a more modern and secure web browser that is actively maintained and patched against known exploits.
A local attacker can exploit this flaw by forcing another user's Netscape 4.5 to crash, then leveraging the talkback feature to kill an arbitrary process owned by that user. This leads to a denial of service for critical applications or data loss if processes are terminated unexpectedly, severely disrupting the affected user's work environment.
No CWE classification has been assigned.
Other CVEs affecting communicator
Netscape Communicator before 4.77 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary Javascript via a GIF image whose comment contains the Javascript.
Buffer overflow in the HTML parser for Netscape 4.75 and earlier allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands via a long password value in a form field.
Netscape Communicator does not properly prevent a ServerSocket object from being created by untrusted entities, which allows remote attackers to create a server on the victim's system via a malicious applet, as demonstrated by Brown Orifice.
Buffer overflow in Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4.7 for Windows 95 and Windows 98 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service, and possibly execute arbitrary commands, via a long argument after the ? character in a URL that references an .asp, .cgi, .html, or .pl file.
Netscape Communicator 4.04 through 4.7 (and possibly other versions) in various UNIX operating systems converts the 0x8b character to a "<" sign, and the 0x9b character to a ">" sign, which could allow remote attackers to attack other clients via cross-site scripting (CSS) in CGI programs that do not filter these characters.
The byte code verifier component of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) allows remote execution through malicious web pages.