Firefox patches keep old versions going

OPEN SOURCE WEB BROWSER outfit Mozilla has released maintenance and security updates to its older versions of Firefox.

The latest release of the browser, Firefox 3.6 is out and fairly popular, but Firefox versions 3.0 and 3.5 are still being used on a lot of machines. The updates mean that Mozzarella is continuing to support the older Firebadger browsers for awhile.

Mozilla patched five vulnerabilities, three of them critical, in the older editions of Firefox. The most recent release, Firefox 3.6 already includes the patches.

There are three critical flaws in the browsers' Gecko rendering engines, the HTML parsers, and Web Worker. Web Worker is a scripting functionality that lets site developers shift Javascript operations to a background thread. If a hacker exploited the critical vulnerabilities they potentially could inject their own malware onto the user's system.

The remaining two vulnerabilities, both rated 'moderate' in Mozilla's four-step scoring system, were bugs that could be exploited in cross-site scripting attacks.

One of the cross-site scripting flaws was reported by a security researcher for the Vole, marking the second time in two days that Microsoft technicians have been credited with passing along security vulnerability information to a rival. µ