Mozilla's latest web browser, Firefox 24, was released this week patching a slew of critical bugs in the product.
Introduced on Tuesday, Firefox 24 plugs 19 vulnerabilities, including 9 "critical" flaws that undermine browser security.
According to a Mozilla security advisory, two of the company's critical Firefox patches rectify use-after-free issues that could lead to a potentially exploitable browser crash, the company said.
Mozilla also addressed two critical memory corruption bugs that could be exploited by an attacker, as well as several memory safety flaws that could allow a saboteur to run malicious code in users' browsers.
“Mozilla developers identified and fixed several memory safety bugs in the browser engine used in Firefox and other Mozilla-based products,” the advisory for patch 2013-76 said. “Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances, and we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code.”
Of the 17 patches implemented with Firefox 24, seven addressed critical vulnerabilities, meaning an attacker could run malicious code or install software of their choosing, and require no user interaction beyond “normal browsing” to carry out the exploit, the advisory said.
