14 DAY TRIAL // Just two days after it delivered the first Release Candidate of its next minor update of Opera 10.50, Opera Software wrapped up the update. Opera 10.53 is currently available for download for all users of the browser running the Windows platform. The release was rushed to the market, as the Norwegian browser maker labored to patch a Critical security vulnerability that had been reported for the previous release, namely version 10.52.
“Opera 10.53 has been released today to address a security issue that has been reported 3 days ago. The builds are the same as Opera 10.53 RC1,” Huib Kleinhout, from the Opera Desktop team, revealed, indicating that, with the vulnerability now patched, Opera Software would continue to focus on the evolution of the browser.
The Opera asynchronous content modification uninitialised memory vulnerability was reported earlier this week, and Opera 10.53 RC1 was produced almost immediately, as a natural response to patch the security flaw. “A vulnerability has been discovered in Opera, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system,” Secunia noted in the advisory for the flaw.
“The vulnerability is caused due to an error when continuously modifying document content on a web page e.g. using document.write(). This may result in a function call using uninitialised memory when a user visits a specially crafted web page. Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code,” the company added.
The security hole was confirmed to affect only the Windows versions of Opera 10.52, but version 10.53 was delivered not only for users of the Microsoft operating system, but also for Apple’s Mac OS X. Opera 10.52 users are advised to download the 10.53 patch as soon as possible and install it in order to protect their systems against attacks attempting to exploit the asynchronous content modification uninitialised memory vulnerability.
Opera 10.53 for Windows is available for download here.