Mozilla Firefox bug causes new update to be pulled offline

A security threat was the cause of Mozilla Firefox’s latest update to be pulled down from the software company’s website on October 11, 2012. Mozilla have advised anyone who has installed Firefox version 16 to downgrade to a lower and safer version till the flaw has been fixed.

According to Mozilla, the vulnerability could allow users browsing history to be made available to malicious websites. The company went on to say that only a limited number of users were thought to have been affected by the flaw. According to a spokesperson, no users had been automatically upgraded to the newer version of the browser and the updated was taken down within 24 hours of its release.

Michael Coates, who is Mozilla’s Director of Security Assurance, has mentioned in his blog post that a fix should be out by October 12, 2012. Coates also went on to say that there have been no known exploits of the threat in the wild.

Coates mentioned that Firefox 16 had been removed from Mozilla’s installer page and that users will be automatically upgraded when a suitable fix has been made available and that users should downgrade to version 15.0.1 in case they had already installed Firefox version 16.