Mozilla Firefox's extension store being flooded with malware
theregister.com
Mozilla Firefox's extension store being flooded with malware
1–10 of 30 posts
Re: Mozilla Firefox's extension store being flooded with malware
#2Recently, there have been a small number of AUR packages claiming to be browsers with RATs included.
Wonder if the activity is related.
Re: Mozilla Firefox's extension store being flooded with malware
#3Firefox is down bad right now. I have used it steadily for 20 something years now, and the cracks are really apparent now. It's also likely that Google will be forced to stop giving Mozilla money for Firefox, leaving little hope for continued development.
This might actually be the end of FF.
Re: Mozilla Firefox's extension store being flooded with malware
#4Recently, there have been a small number of AUR packages claiming to be browsers with RATs included. Wonder if the activity is related.
Not sure, I would bet on the OWGs instead.
Re: Mozilla Firefox's extension store being flooded with malware
#5Firefox is down bad right now. I have used it steadily for 20 something years now, and the cracks are really apparent now. It's also likely that Google will be forced to stop giving Mozilla money for Firefox, leaving little hope for continued development. This might actually be the end of FF.
Firefox could enter a revenue share parternship with Bing, or another search engine. Or they could follow in Brave's (and Google's and Microsoft's) footsteps in creating a search engine in order to own such a lucrative advertising surface.
Re: Mozilla Firefox's extension store being flooded with malware
#6Partially off topic, but youtube ads for me are currently 70% out and out scams - deepfaked tv personalities telling you about some government scheme where every person gets £20,000 cash.
Even the closed ecosystems are infected.
Re: Mozilla Firefox's extension store being flooded with malware
#7Firefox is down bad right now. I have used it steadily for 20 something years now, and the cracks are really apparent now. It's also likely that Google will be forced to stop giving Mozilla money for Firefox, leaving little hope for continued development. This might actually be the end of FF.
Somewhat counterintuitively, Google being forced to stop giving Mozilla money is arguably the best single thing that can happen to the project right now.
Re: Mozilla Firefox's extension store being flooded with malware
#8Partially off topic, but youtube ads for me are currently 70% out and out scams - deepfaked tv personalities telling you about some government scheme where every person gets £20,000 cash. Even the closed ecosystems are infected.
What do you mean by a closed ecosystem in this context? Because I wouldn’t considered YT ads a closed ecosystem compared to MAO. They are both a publishing platforms, one is just paid. The problem with spam or malware is that there is monetary return for your investment in it. Paying to distribute spam or malware is reasonable strategy if there is a decent ROI. Your local businesses flooding your mailbox with spam through USPS are all paying for it.
In publishing, I’d consider something like The Economist or NTY to be a “closed ecosystem”. Many of those places (like CNBC, Fox, WaPo, etc) have auto generated spam articles every day whether it’s a company's earnings or a press release regurgitation. Sometimes that garbage can be accidentally harmful. At least we’re not at the point that CNBC push crypto miners in their blogs. We’re not far off though
Re: Mozilla Firefox's extension store being flooded with malware
#9Partially off topic, but youtube ads for me are currently 70% out and out scams - deepfaked tv personalities telling you about some government scheme where every person gets £20,000 cash. Even the closed ecosystems are infected.
It's been like that since before "AI" (before ChatGPT's big marketing break-out)
Google's revenue is largely from promoting scams and tricking old people into clicking ads that look like normal search results. They're a total scumbag company, it's a sign of how broken consumer protection is that they've gotten away with it for years with no meaningful legal consequences.
[EDIT] Downvotes are warranted, I missed the large part of their revenue that comes from extorting companies into paying for ads for their own brand name so competitors and scams don't top searches for them.
Re: Mozilla Firefox's extension store being flooded with malware
#10Partially off topic, but youtube ads for me are currently 70% out and out scams - deepfaked tv personalities telling you about some government scheme where every person gets £20,000 cash. Even the closed ecosystems are infected.
What do you mean by a closed ecosystem in this context? Because I wouldn’t considered YT ads a closed ecosystem compared to MAO. They are both a publishing platforms, one is just paid. The problem with spam or malware is that there is monetary return for your investment in it. Paying to distribute spam or malware is reasonable strategy if there is a decent ROI. Your local businesses flooding your mailbox with spam th…
Its googles advertising network - there are and should be guard rails in place. They should audit the content. They should do KYC. They should do many many things.
"it's better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission (and keep the money either way)" is probably up on the wall instead of "do no evil"