Technology news and Jobs arrow Information Technology News arrow More critical security flaws revealed and fixed in Firefox 2
More critical security flaws revealed and fixed in Firefox 2 E-mail
by Stephen Withers   
Wednesday, 02 July 2008
Firefox 3 arrived with a bang last month, but its predecessor is still being maintained. Version 2.0.0.15, released this week patches a dozen security flaws, five of them rated critical.

Register now to win a Canon EOS 500D Cannon EOS 500D Digiral SLR

At least two of the critical vulnerabilities permit the execution of arbitrary code, and another involves crashes with memory corruption, often taken as a sign that it may be possible to exploit the bug to trigger code execution.

Among the four high impact vulnerabilities fixed in 2.0.0.15 is one that's specific to Java LiveConnect on Mac OS X and allows arbitrary socket connections. Another in the category could be exploited to trigger the upload of arbitrary files.

Two of the remaining vulnerabilities were judged to be of moderate impact, and one was rated low (the category used for minor security vulnerabilities such as Denial of Service attacks, minor data leaks, or spoofs).

Mozilla has not yet published security advisories for these bugs. One possible explanation is that a critical flaw found in Firefox 3.0 also existed in version 2.0.x, and a fix for the the new browser has yet to be released.
 
Even with the development of Firefox 3, there has been no shortage of updates for its predecessor during 2008. Version 2.0.0.14 appeared in April, 2.0.0.13 in March, and 2.0.0.12 in February. All contained one or more critical fixes.

Around 28 million copies of Firefox 3.0 have been downloaded from Mozilla's network or mirror sites.

According to Net Applications, Firefox 2 accounts for 16 percent of web usage, with Firefox 3 taking 2 percent. That's quite different from iTWire's readership, which is over 30 percent Firefox 3 and over 25 percent Firefox 2.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser to post your comment!

Tags See All Tags Add New Tag...

Please Enter New Tags Separated By Comma's
  Or Close

Browsers  Firefox  Internet  Internet Explorer  Security  Stephen Withers  Web 
Powered By Joomla Tags

 
< Next story in category   Previous story in the category >
iTWire user statistics Visitors last 30 days
665,005
Subscribers 14,517
#1 independent technology news advertise here
  •   *  
  • Search
  • AdvSeach
  • Login
  • Events
  • FreeStuff

Follow iTWire on Twitter

About iTWire

iTWire is all about technology news, information, jobs and community for the IT and telecommunications industry professional. Subscribe to our free ICT daily newsletter