Security News
This follows an intriguing month of Firefox 100 releases, with Firefox 100.0 arriving, as did Chromium 100 a month or so before it, without any trouble caused by the shift from a two-digit to a three-digit version number. No doubt in part due to the efforts of both Google's Chromium and Mozilla's Firefox coders, the 100.0 release of both browsers was ultimately uneventful.
The maintainers of the Tails project have issued a warning that the Tor Browser that's bundled with the operating system is unsafe to use for accessing or entering sensitive information. "We recommend that you stop using Tails until the release of 5.1 if you use Tor Browser for sensitive information," the project said in an advisory issued this week.
Mozilla has released security updates for multiple products to address zero-day vulnerabilities exploited during the Pwn2Own Vancouver 2022 hacking contest. If exploited, the two critical flaws can let attackers gain JavaScript code execution on mobile and desktop devices running vulnerable versions of Firefox, Firefox ESR, Firefox for Android, and Thunderbird.
Late last week, our Slackware Linux distro announced an update to follow the scheduled-and-expected Firefox 100 release, which came out at the start of the month. The blog article, entitled Improved Process Isolation in Firefox 100, actually came out the day before the 100.0.1 release was uploaded to the FTP server, as though the changes were already accomplished in the 100.0 release.
At its current release rate of once every four weeks, Firefox has just over 23 years to go to equal Lara's quadruple century, and almost 30 years to reach 502*. No trouble at the version number mill. Back in February 2022, a few mainstream sites didn't seem to realise that 100 was greater than 99, presumably because they were hard-coded to use only the first two characters of the version number, millennium bug style, thus turning the text 100 either into the number 10, or into the number zero.
The once-every-four-weeks security update to Mozilla's Firefox browser officially arrived today. The regular version of Firefox is now 99.0, while the Extended Support Release, which gets security fixes without any feature updates, is now 91.8.0 ESR. Add together the first two numbers in the ESR release triplet and you should get the same value as the first number in the regular release.
Mozilla has removed the Yandex Search, Mail.ru, and OK.ru default search providers from the Firefox browser over reports of state-sponsored content favored in search results. Since 2014, Mozilla has made Yandex the default search engine in Russia, and the following year made it the default search for users in Turkey.
Mozilla has removed the Yandex Search, Mail.ru, and OK.ru default search providers from the Firefox browser over reports of state-sponsored content favored in search results. Since 2014, Mozilla has made Yandex the default search engine in Russia, and the following year made it the default search for users in Turkey.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has ordered federal civilian agencies to patch two critical Firefox security vulnerabilities exploited in attacks within the next two weeks. According to a binding operational directive issued in November, Federal Civilian Executive Branch Agencies agencies are now required to secure their systems against these vulnerabilities, with CISA giving them until March 21st to apply patches.
Mozilla has pushed out-of-band software updates to its Firefox web browser to contain two high-impact security vulnerabilities, both of which it says are being actively exploited in the wild. Tracked as CVE-2022-26485 and CVE-2022-26486, the zero-day flaws have been described as use-after-free issues impacting the Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations parameter processing and the WebGPU inter-process communication Framework.