Mozilla Fixes Critical Flaw in Firefox

There is another new version of Mozilla Firefox available, and version 10.0.1 includes a fix for a critical security vulnerability in the browser. The flaw is a serious use-after-free flaw in a component of the browser that also exists in Thunderbird, SeaMonkey and other Mozilla products.

"Mozilla developers Andrew McCreight and Olli Pettay found that ReadPrototypeBindings will leave a XBL binding in a hash table even when the function fails. If this occurs, when the cycle collector reads this hash table and attempts to do a virtual method on this binding a crash will occur. This crash may be potentially exploitable," Mozilla said in its advisory.

In addition to Firefox, the use-after-free bug also was present in various versions of SeaMonkey, the application suite from Mozilla that includes a variety of software, such as a newsgroup client, Web development tools, an HTML editor and other tools. Mozilla Thunderbird, the company's email client, also had the same vulnerability, and it's fixed in version 10.0.1 as well.

Users can get the new version of Firefox by clicking the "Firefox" button in the top left corner of the browser and then going to "Help" and "About Firefox". The "Apply Update" button should be visible, and clicking that will install the new version of the browser and restart it.

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