Firefox for Linux adware?
I have recently noticed that Firefox would randomly go to different websites. For a while I thought it was my touchpad acting up and somehow taking text that I had copied and somehow pasting it to Firefox which would in turn search google and go to the first site that matched. The ads seemed to become more and more frequent until I decided to do something about it. I took a look at my .mozilla directory. Lots of stuff in there… I saw some strange things from Silverpop that looked like it was running JavaScripts from them. I deleted those lines but figured I didn’t want to wait until it happened again and then I just deleted the whole .mozilla directory. I have no doubt that I had adware which I installed somehow. It could have been an extension I installed or an exploit caused by JavaScript. I backed up my bookmarks and deleted the .mozilla directory. Right afterI did that I felt like I should have saved it and found out why I had this strangeness installed. After all my work to secure my system, it’s all been compromised by some stupid Firefox nonsense. I feel shafted. Any ideas?
May 4th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
I installed all my normal extensions and visited all my normal sites and guess what? I have my adware again. I moved the .mozilla directory instead of deleting it this time. I’m not sure what’s the source of my problems but I did narrow it down a little. In my history I can see that the random pages are being given to me via Google’s I’m feeling lucky.
I’m now taking one extension at a time to find out if its the extensions or some strange Javascript exploit that a site that I happen across is using. So far I’ve only installed Chatzilla and I haven’t experienced my random site problem yet.
I also plan to go back to my compromised backup of my .mozilla directory and see if it will go to a random site if I just sit it there all night without touching it. I want to see if there is a trigger that is causing it or if it’s really some random process in the background.
May 24th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
I haven’t had any adware experiences lately. So far I’ve got delicious, web devloper, and chatzilla extensions installed.