Microsoft"s Internet Explorer isn"t the only Web browser with serious security issues. Mozilla on Sept. 15 shipped a "highly critical" Firefox update to correct a range of security flaws that could lead to security bypass, cross-site scripting, spoofing, denial-of-service and system access attacks.
The open-source group patched a total of seven vulnerabilities in its flagship browser and warned that the majority of the flaws could be exploited to run attacker code without any user interaction beyond normal Web browsing. Since releasing Firefox 1.5 in November 2005, Mozilla has patched 59 security vulnerabilities in the browser, more than half rated by the company as "critical." The most serious bug fixed in the Firefox 1.0.7 update is an error in the handling of JavaScript. This can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow to execute arbitrary code without user action.