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Mozilla issues Firefox alert

Colin Barker ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 12 Dec 2005 15:10 GMT

Mozilla issued a security advisory on Sunday acknowledging concerns about a potential flaw its Firefox 1.5 browser that could cause a buffer overflow error.

However the company browser strenuously denied that the problem would cause any lasting damage to the application insisting that it was very easy to fix.

The issue came to light last Wednesday when the first exploit code for the potential vulnerability was published.

The issue only occurs with extremely long history.dat files. If the history file gets larger than 10.5MB then the system can appear to freeze. According to Mozilla, the system is not actually frozen, but just takes some time to clear the history buffer. The company points out that all users need to do is clear out the History to cure the problem.

We have "issued a security advisory on a temporary start-up unresponsiveness caused by Web pages in a browser history with extremely long titles," the company said in a statement. "If a user encounters this problem, the slow start can be fixed by clearing the browser history."

The problem carries a non-critical rating, according to Mozilla.