If you use Firefox, you will be glad to know that Mozilla is on-task: Firefox 2.0 has gotten its first update.
Prior to this update, there were eight vulnerabilities in the Firefox browser. Some of them (five of the eight) were pretty nasty and were rated as “critical” by Mozilla. According to Mozilla’s website, critical is defined as:
Vulnerability can be used to run attacker code and install software, requiring no user interaction beyond normal browsing.
Yikes, these needed to be addressed. Two of the eight were rated “high” which is defined as:
Vulnerability can be used to gather sensitive data from sites in other windows or inject data or code into those sites, requiring no more than normal browsing actions.
So, seven of the eight put you at a significant risk anytime you browsed the Internet as usual 8o. I am glad they patched these holes because I really do not want to have to start using IE ;).
As an aside, you may remember a post we did on Firefox running slow. Well, these patches will also repair some memory leaks that could have caused Firefox to “hog up a bunch of extra memory” (no that is not the technical term). So maybe the patches will fix the problem that I was experiencing with Firefox speed (although, I am blazing along since doing some sweet Firefox tweaking). Nice.
If you want to make sure you are updated, follow these steps:
That will manually check Mozilla’s site and grab the latest updates for Firefox. I prefer to do that rather than wait for the automatic update to begin.