The company calls this release a recommended security and stability update

Mar 27, 2012 09:29 GMT  ·  By

The release of Opera 11.62 is catalogued by the company as being a “recommended security and stability update” in which not only vulnerabilities are addressed, but also a number of functionality issues.

The improvements made in the security sector are important because most of them are made to prevent cybercriminals from launching their operations.

For instance, a high severity security hole refers to the fact that small windows can be used to trick customers into downloading files. More precisely, in normal circumstances the user can see the download dialog, but an error allowed crooks to make the window small enough so that it couldn’t be seen properly.

Combined with a social engineering attack, the results of this weakness could have been devastating if left unaddressed.

The lack of properly implemented policies also allowed crooks to leverage overlapping content to trick users to execute downloaded files.

The previous versions of Opera are affected by a low severity problem that may lead to the theft of sensitive information in certain circumstances.

This was possible because the browser didn’t restrict the state data to the page that created it when sites used the history.pushState and history.replaceState functions to add or replace history entries.

Another issue that exposed customers of previous versions was the fact that web page dialogs could be used to display an incorrect address, allowing an attacking site to replicate the name of the target website in the address field.

A site address spoofing flaw also affected older Windows versions of Opera.

Besides the aforementioned issues, the Mac variants also contained a moderate severity vulnerability that could have permitted an attacker to falsify the address field and create custom dialogs that could contain misleading information.

The Linux version also comes with an extra improvement compared to the Windows release. A printing flaw might have been leveraged by a cybercriminal to leak information to other system users and even corrupt data.

Opera 11.62 for Windows is available for download here Opera 11.62 for Mac is available for download here Opera 11.62 for Linux is available for download here

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