Firefox patches critical flaws

 

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By Miya Knights

Posted on 23 Oct 2007 at 11:53

Mozilla has updated its Firefox browser, patching 10 flaws, three of which have been rated as critical.

Security vendor Secunia notes that the most serious of the bugs could allow code execution, allowing attackers to insert malware into systems running an unpatched version of Firefox.

The software provider also updated a patch that was first issued in July and was designed to plug the hole created by a Universal Resource Identifier (URI) weakness in Windows which was identified some months ago, but only acknowledged by Microsoft last week.

In notes accompanying the URI patch, Mozilla says: "That [July patch] did not prevent the incorrect file-handling programs from launching, which left some risk."

It also says an additional fix has been applied to its latest version, Firefox 2.0.0.8, that "detects when Windows would mishandle these URIs so that the wrong program does not get launched". And this patch follows a series from Mozilla that attempt to plug the URI vulnerability gap.