February 7, 2006 - The Mozilla Firefox V1.5 Exploit Is Out

Last week, the Mozilla folks released Firefox V1.5.0.1. This version includes many changes, driven by security and stability needs, including one major known vulnerability, a potential for remote code execution.

This week, the bad guys released an exploit, that uses the latter vulnerability, as part of the Metasploit Framework. Metasploit Framework, in layman's terms, is a sophisticated library of hacking tools. If your computer is successfully hacked, Metasploit Framework can be used to program your computer with any of a number of different tools, at the will of the hackers.

What does this mean to you? Quite simply, if you're using Firefox (and I hope that you are), it's time to upgrade. Firefox V1.0.7 is vulnerable to many problems fixed by V1.5.0.1. Do everybody a huge favour, and move ahead. V1.5.0.1 has been out for a week, and is widely in use. You too should be using it.