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By George Norman - Software News Editor

Added on 11 Sep 2009(1216 Views)

A couple of days ago the Mozilla Foundation rolled out an update to its web browser, mainly Firefox 3.5.3. The update is meant to make the Firefox browser a more stable piece of software and plug several security holes affecting the application. To be more precise, Firefox 3.5.3 fixes a total of 4 security vulnerabilities: three are critical and one is low.

Just to put things in perspective, Mozilla uses a 4-tier security rating: low, moderate, high and critical. Out of the security issues that Firefox 3.5.3 addresses one has been given the low security rating and the remaining three have been rated as critical. The low security vulnerability, MFSA 2009-50 refers to the fact that “the default Windows font used to render the locationbar and other text fields was improperly displaying certain Unicode characters with tall line-height. In such cases the tall line-height would cause the rest of the text in the input field to be scrolled vertically out of view.” A person with malicious intent could exploit this vulnerability an conceal the URL of a malicious site from the user.


The remaining three, critical vulnerabilities are:
MFSA 2009-47 – the browser would crash with evidence of memory corruption. If successfully exploited, a person with malicious intent could run arbitrary code.
MFSA 2009-49 – one could manipulate the columns of a XUL tree element which would “leave a pointer owned by the column pointing to freed memory.” A person with malicious intent that successfully exploits this vulnerability could crash and run arbitrary code on the targeted computer.
MFSA 2009-51 – JavaScript code can be run with elevated privileges because of a vulnerability in BrowserFeedWriter. A person with malicious intent could exploit this to run malicious code with chrome privileges.

You are very well advised to update your Firefox 3.5 browser if you have not done so already. Only by keeping an up-to-date browser can you protect yourself from people with malicious intent that want to exploit a vulnerability and compromise your system.

If you would like to get Firefox 3.5.3, you can download it straight from FindMySoft here.
Alternatively you can get it from the official Mozilla Firefox web page here.

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Tags: Mozilla, Firefox, Browser, Update, Security

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