Patch Your Firefox

Mozilla just released 16 patches for vulnerabilities in Firefox. Eleven of the flaws are critical, and affect a number of components in the browser.Six of the flaws are ranked as critical, all of the flaws affect version 3.5.4.

From Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2009-63:

"Mozilla upgraded several third party libraries used in media rendering to address multiple memory safety and stability bugs identified by members of the Mozilla community. Some of the bugs discovered could potentially be used by an attacker to crash a victim's browser and execute arbitrary code on their computer. liboggz, libvorbis, and liboggplay were all upgraded to address these issues."

Aside from those third-party media libraries, flaws also affected the JavaScript and browser engine and GIF map parser.

The flaw in Security Advisory 2009-57, found that the XPCOM utility XPCVariant::VariantDataToJS unwrapped doubly-wrapped objects before returning them to chrome callers. This enabled the possibility for bad code to be escalated to be executed with Chrome privileges.

The flaws in Mozilla aren't hurting its growth. Just yesterday Mozilla CEO John Lilly said in a Twitter post that Firefox grew by more than 30 million in the previous eight weeks. As of September 2009, web-analytics company Net Applications estimates nearly 24 percent of Internet browsers use Firefox.

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