New Firefox 1.0.7 release fixes critical security bugs

IDG News Service - The Mozilla Foundation has released a new version of its Firefox browser that fixes two critical security bugs in the software that were reported over the past week.
The most widely reported flaw concerns the International Domain Name (IDN) feature that Mozilla products use to process Web pages that do not use the Latin alphabet (see "Security flaw targets Firefox, Linux users").
Links pointing to a host with a long name composed entirely of dashes could be crafted so that earlier versions of Firefox would execute arbitrary code of an attacker's choosing. That means an attacker theoretically could use the flaw to take control of a user's machine by launching a buffer overflow attack.
Firefox 1.0.7, released this morning, also fixes a critical flaw in the way the Mozilla software handles Unix and Linux shell commands that could allow attackers to run unauthorized software on some systems, said Chris Beard, head of products with Mozilla Corp.
All Firefox users are encouraged to download the new release, which also contains a number of minor changes designed to make the browser more stable and secure, Beard said.
The IDN bug was discovered by security researcher Tom Ferris and made public via a posting to the Full Disclosure security mailing list last Friday. By the end of the day, Mozilla had published a work-around that disabled the IDN feature (see "Mozilla offers workaround for Firefox flaw"). With the 1.0.7 release, the problem has now been rectified, Beard said.
Mozilla is planning a similar update for its Mozilla Suite browser by the end of the week, Beard said.
More information on the Firefox 1.0.7 release can be found online.