Mozilla patches "critical" holes in Firefox

Mozilla has released updates for its Firefox browser, Thunderbird email application and the SeaMonkey application suite to fix "critical" security vulnerabilities.

The vulnerabilities affect 1.5 versions of Firefox and Thunderbird as well as version 1 of the SeaMonkey suite, Mozilla said in its security advisories. The bugs do not affect Firefox 2.0, the latest version of the browser released late last month.

Security monitoring companies Secunia and the French Security Incident Response Team, or FrSirt, deem the issues "highly critical" and "critical", respectively. People who use vulnerable versions of the Mozilla products are urged to upgrade to the fixed versions, both companies said.

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Mozilla has fixed a number of bugs that could cause its products to crash or, in some cases, be exploited to hijack a PC, it said in an advisory. Other problems that have been repaired include a flaw that could be abused to run malicious JavaScript and a vulnerability that could let miscreants fake digital signatures, Mozilla said.

Secunia said in its alert: "The security vulnerabilities could be exploited by malicious people to bypass security restrictions, conduct cross-site scripting attacks and potentially compromise a vulnerable system."

Mozilla plans to support Firefox 1.5 until October 2007, one year after it shipped Firefox 2. The security flaws are fixed in Firefox 1.5.0.8, Thunderbird 1.5.0.8 and SeaMonkey 1.0.6. The previous Firefox security update was released in September.

Joris Evers writes for CNET News.com