Firefox users targeted by rare piece of malware

[snydeq]

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/12/04/Firefox_users_targeted_by_rare_piece_of_malware_1.html

[Tichy]

What a crap article: first, the malware has nothing to with a Firefox exploit. It is just something that infects a PC by any other means (the article doesn't say which), just like any other malware would.

Then the article describes the unwanted HTML in a language pack, which is totally unrelated. I guess they want to suggest that the malware in question could slip into Firefox in the same way, but there is no reason whatsoever to assume that would be the case.

[josefresco]

"After the incident, Mozilla said it would scan add-ons in its repository when antivirus signatures were updated."

Amazing this wasn't already being done.

What about iPhone apps with well hidden Trojans? What's the review process?

[khill]

Based on the information at http://www.bitdefender.com/VIRUS-1000451-en--Trojan.PWS.Chro... it seems this only effects Firefox users on Windows platforms.

[flashgordon]

so technically it is neither a firefox nor a greasemonkey bug ...

[ars → flashgordon]

It's not a bug at all, but then, no one said it was.

It's just a new type of malware: a firefox addon based malware. How it gets installed is a different question, but the takeway from the article is that it's now necessary to virus scan addons.