Way back in early 2010, I wrote about fake Firefox installers in an article ‘Is your Firefox genuine? Phishing at its phinest!‘ after a colleague fell for an ad pointing to a malware-loaded version of the popular browser.
After the Internet Explorer vulnerability was blown way out of proportion by the media last month, it sent a lot of Windows users with Internet Explorer looking for alternatives. Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are the other popular browsers most people will use on Windows in addition to Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, it seems ‘Firefox’ is still a dangerous keyword that malware authors like to target.
I have included a gallery of screenshots below from searching ‘firefox’ or ‘foxfire’ (as people often mistakenly call it for some reason) on Bing and Google. Both search engines present ads very prominently that link to modified versions of Firefox paired with malware. The bundled junkware could install toolbars, popups, or worse malicious software on your computer which could reduce the performance, security, or privacy of your computer. The listings like ez-download, downloadd.org, firefox.io, and others are very questionable. I would even avoid the Yahoo-branded and Microsoft-branded versions.
To download the legitimate, malware-free Firefox web browser directly from the source, visit www.Mozilla.org.
