The version of Thunderbird installed on the remote Windows host is prior to 78.2. It is, therefore, affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the mfsa2020-41 advisory.

  - Mozilla developers Jason Kratzer, Christian Holler, Byron Campen, Tyson Smith reported memory safety bugs     present in Thunderbird 78.1. Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption and we presume that     with enough effort some of these could have been exploited to run arbitrary code. (CVE-2020-15670)

  - If Thunderbird is installed to a user-writable directory, the Mozilla Maintenance Service would execute     updater.exe from the install location with system privileges. Although the Mozilla Maintenance Service     does ensure that updater.exe is signed by Mozilla, the version could have been rolled back to a previous     version which would have allowed exploitation of an older bug and arbitrary code execution with System     Privileges. Note: This issue only affected Windows operating systems. Other operating systems are     unaffected. (CVE-2020-15663)

  - By holding a reference to the <code>eval()</code> function from an about:blank window, a malicious webpage     could have gained access to the InstallTrigger object which would allow them to prompt the user to install     an extension. Combined with user confusion, this could result in an unintended or malicious extension     being installed. (CVE-2020-15664)

Note that Nessus has not tested for these issues but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

Detections

Analytics

Mozilla Thunderbird < 78.2

high Nessus Plugin ID 139868

Version 1.5

Version 1.4

Version 1.5 Nov 19, 2025, 7:37 AM Detection (updated detection logic) Plugin metadata Plugin Feed: 202511190737
Version 1.4 Feb 23, 2024, 3:16 PM CVSSv3 score source (set to "CVE-2020-15670") Exploit attributes ("Exploit available" set to "False") Plugin Feed: 202402231516