Firefox 6 patches 10 dangerous security holes

Mozilla has shipped a critical Firefox update to fix at least 10 security vulnerabilities, some serious enough to expose web surfers to drive-by download attacks.

According to an advisory from the open-source group, 8 of the 10 vulnerabilities are rated “critical,” meaning that they can be used to run attacker code and install software, requiring no user interaction beyond normal browsing.

Here’s a glimpse of the critical issues: Mozilla identified and fixed several memory safety bugs in the browser engine used in Firefox 4, Firefox 5 and other Mozilla-based products. 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.