Lucian Constantin
CSO Senior Writer

Firefox 16 addresses numerous critical vulnerabilities

news
Oct 10, 20122 mins

Eleven of the 14 security advisories accompanying Firefox 16 were rated as critical

Mozilla Firefox 16 was released on Tuesday and addresses numerous security vulnerabilities, many of which are rated as critical.

The new version of Firefox was accompanied by 14 security advisories. Eleven of those are rated as critical and some of them cover more than one vulnerability.

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Many of the critical security holes that were addressed in Firefox 16 could have allowed attackers to execute arbitrary code on the system, bypass security checks that prevent Web pages from interacting with the browser in unauthorized ways, perform spoofing or clickjacking attacks, and, in the case of the Android version of Firefox, allow a malicious Web page opened in reader mode to gain the browser’s permissions on the OS.

The other three security advisories were rated as medium severity and covered vulnerabilities that could have allowed attackers to execute cross-site scripting (XSS) or script injection attacks.

Most of the vulnerabilities fixed in Firefox 16, were also addressed in Mozilla Thunderbird 16 and Mozilla SeaMonkey 2.13 which were also released on Tuesday. Some of the fixes have also been backported to the Firefox and Thunderbird ESR (Extended Support Release) versions that are used in enterprise environments.

In addition to security patches, the new Firefox 16 also includes numerous bug fixes, improves JavaScript responsiveness, adds initial support for Web apps and preliminary VoiceOver support and features a revamped developer toolbar.

Lucian Constantin

Lucian Constantin writes about information security, privacy, and data protection for CSO. Before joining CSO in 2019, Lucian was a freelance writer for VICE Motherboard, Security Boulevard, Forbes, and The New Stack. Earlier in his career, he was an information security correspondent for the IDG News Service and Information security news editor for Softpedia.

Before he became a journalist, Lucian worked as a system and network administrator. He enjoys attending security conferences and delving into interesting research papers. He lives and works in Romania.

You can reach him at lucian_constantin@foundryco.com or @lconstantin on X. For encrypted email, his PGP key's fingerprint is: 7A66 4901 5CDA 844E 8C6D 04D5 2BB4 6332 FC52 6D42

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