Firefox updates, blitzes trio of critical bugs

By John Leyden → More by this author

8 Feb 2008 11:58

It's raining security updates

Mozilla pushed out a new update of Firefox on Thursday that fixes ten security vulnerabilities, three of which are deemed critical.

The trio of critical patches for Firefox 2.0.0.12 variously fix vulnerabilities including web browsing history and forward navigation stealing bugs; a privilege escalation flaw that creates a possible mechanism to run cross site scripting exploits and also poses a malware injection risk; and a memory corruption bug in the popular open source browser. A full list of the flaws can be found here.

The patches are being pushed out via automatic update.

The Firefox update completes a busy week for client software update, with patches for Adobe Reader, Skype and QuickTime all arriving this week. Client-side versions of Java also need updating. Next week promises the arrival of a dozen patches from Microsoft, on a special Valentine's Day edition of Patch Tuesday, seven of which earn the dread rating of critical. The critical updates cover a variety of unspecified flaws in IE, Office and Windows as explained in Microsoft's alert here.

Security notification firm Secunia reported on Thursday that progress in installing the then available patches has been slow. Reason enough, you'd think, for sys admins to put in for overtime even before Microsoft's update next Tuesday. ®

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