FireFox users Beware

[lots0]

A heads up to everyone that runs Firefox.

I just found casinoroom.com running inside firefox.exe and having full conectivity to the net. A full blown badware program.

It was installed when I allowed a browser addon to be installed in firefox. We are still not sure what addon it was.

Anyway beware, if you run firefox... It is not safe as it once was, the scum of the www have started targeting it.

Check your running processes, with firefox open, running and connected.

 

[catrina m]

I quit using firefox a few months ago, it was doing strange things with plug ins but most annoying is my bookmarks kept getting erased for no reason, they would just dissapper.

 

[maxd]

I just found casinoroom.com running inside firefox.exe and having full conectivity to the net. A full blown badware program.

I love Firefox, wouldn't go back to IE if you paid me to but ...

No browser is "safe" without some serious additional protection, meaning virus, spyware and malware detection. Zone-Alarm Pro + something like ESET Antivirus is a good place to start: nothing gets saved, executed or accesses the web without first getting scanned and/or getting your permission, where applicable. Yes, it does introduce some overhead in terms of system-level things you need to pay attention to but if your privacy and web safety are important to you it's worthwhile effort.

Now, to the issue at hand:

You're pretty much assured that any Firefox add-on you get from the official site,

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, are going to be clean and safe. If something ever does go wonky with them they get reported very quickly.

Add-ons you get elsewhere are suspect, as a matter of course.

Toolbars and the like that sites offer are highly suspect since they often contain evil bits that do their provider a lot more good than they'll ever do you.

Firefox "updates" offered by anyone other than Mozilla are strictly verbotten.

Did I miss anything?

 

[Deaddog]

I've only ever had one bad experience with a firefox plugin and that was the world cup football score tracker a few years back. No matter what I did it would not uninstall. From then on I always use caution with FF plugins so thanks for the heads up about this.