Patch or Die

Well, "Patch or Die" might be a bit of an overstatement. But patches are important to the "health" of your computer. And perhaps the health of your finances; there are many viruses out there that are related to financial theft. (More on that in another future post.)

So the Mozilla products (Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey) have been fixed with latest patches. Vulnerabilities would allow the attacker to gain control of your computer. US CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) recommends upgrades to current versions. Disabling Java and Javascript will help mitigate the vulnerability, at the expense of usability of many sites.

Mozilla has released Firefox 1.5.0.12, Firefox 2.0.0.4, Thunderbird 1.5.0.12, Thunderbird 2.0.0.4, SeaMonkey 1.0.9, and SeaMonkey 1.1.2 to correct these problems. Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey automatically check for updates by default.

Support for Firefox 1.5 is scheduled to end in June 2007. According to Mozilla: "Firefox 1.5.0.x will be maintained with security and stability updates until June 2007. All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to Firefox 2. "

In addition, patches have been released for Apple products, including OS/X and QuickTime (affects Windows as Mac users). There is also a fairly serious Cisco product vulnerability that has been patched, along with the usual assortment of *nix-based product patches.

Computer Best Practices: make sure that your computer (and all programs) are configured for automatic updates. Some programs have a "Check for Updates" choice in their Help menu. Microsoft updates (Windows and Office) are available. Updates for *nix systems are also important.