Bogus Firefox 9.0.2?
Hi,
A member of my family has been running Firefox 9.0.1 happily on an Acer Aspire running Linux for several months, but recently he got an offer to update to version 9.0.2 which he accepted. The new version appears to be much slower and less reliable than the previous one, and no Mozilla site seems to refer to a Firefox 9.0.2 update. It still refers to itself as 9.0.1 in the About box. Is this update bogus?
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Firefox 9.0.2 does not exist. Only download updates from the official websites.
Of course. However, according to him this update was offered via a pop-up box in the bottom right hand corner in the usual way. Clicking on the box did not lead to another website but performed the usual update install process within Firefox, with the download bar appearing at the bottom of the window. So if this was a bogus version, then the update process itself has been subverted.
I inspected the log file within the updates sub directory of the Firefox install and it showed that at the time he specified the Firefox updater itself did run and replaced all files in the Firefox install. The only apparent difference between the old version and the new was that the "default appearance" was in an extension directory.
The unreliability appeared to be caused by Flash Player, which was firing off a large number of "defunct plugin containers" and repeatedly running a script called sensemute which appeared to check the system volume., although something was also causing "sleep 300" processes to appear.
After disabling Flash Player I ran a packet sniffer on outputs from the laptop and the only sign of unauthorised network activity was intermittent messages being sent to omni-traffic.com.
If he is running the version of Firefox that came with his Linux operating system, check with support for the distro of Linux being used on that device to see if they released a 9.0.2 update. Linux distros handle their own updates for all the programs that come with their distro, and updates for their version of Firefox don't come from the Mozilla update system.
This update did, however, definitely come from the Mozilla update system.
Mozilla never released a Firefox 9.0.2 version.
I'm aware of that. Nonetheless, what I stated in my post was true. A 9.0.2 update was claimed and the Firefox updater did run, replacing all files in the directory and adding an extension for "default appearance". How can I find out what this presumably bogus update has done to the system? My Dad is now too scared to use the web...
Check the browsing history for this website - vkernel.org - if you want to look at that page disable Javascript before clicking that link, so you don't create a problem for yourself on your PC.
It is a web forgery that I have seen posted about here twice in the last week. I reported it to Google safe browsing as a web forgery on Tuesday or Wednesday, but it hasn't been added to their database yet. I don't think it would have had any affect in a Linux version of Firefox, the Javascript on that page is specifically for Windows PC's.