Mozilla warns of low-risk DoS vulnerability in Firefox 3

Mozilla said Wednesday that it is investigating a new, vulnerability in Firefox 3 web browser that could permit an attacker to crash a victim's browser.

The flaw, reported by application delivery solutions provider Radware, could result in a denial-of-service condition if a user is successfully led to the exploit website, the company said in a news release.

The bug is caused by a null pointer dereference error in Firefox's content layout component, according to the Mozilla Security Blog. This means that when an application dereferences a pointer, or a programming language data type that points to an object, it expects it to be valid -- but on a malicious page it would be null.

While Radware says an exploit would lead to the loss of any unsaved information, Mozilla said it includes a feature in Firefox that restores the browser if it crashes, likely resulting in the restoration of any data.

Mozilla said it has assigned a "low" severity rating to the bug and will continue to investigate.

Firefox 3 was released in June.

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