Firefox Vietnamese Language Pack Infected With Trojan

An anonymous reader writes "Wired.com is reporting that the Firefox browser has been unknowingly distributing a trojan with the Firefox Vietnamese language pack. Over 16,000 downloads of the pack occurred since being infected. This highlights a risk on relying on user-submitted Firefox extensions, or a lack of peer-review of the extensions, many of which receive frequent upgrades."

Comments

Ignore this

[Anonymous Coward]

post. removing incorrect mod.

Re:Downside of OSS

[betterunixthanunix]

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA

We have quality control also. Also, this language pack trojan was caught early on...

Re:Downside of OSS

[Paradise Pete]

I'm not saying commercial software is perfect in that regard (there have been cases of commerically distributed software containing malware too), but at least there is generally some level of quality control there.

Creative MP3 players ship with virus
Apple Ships iPods with Windows Virus
Seagate Storage Units Ship with Virus
Sega Dreamcast console game spreads virus
Maxtor USB Hard Drives Ship Virus Infected
Digital photo frames ship with computer virus
Sony Ships Rootkit

More Slashdot Sensationalism

[MobyDisk]

The article says:

...That Trojan inserted a banner-ad displaying script into any html file on his system, which included the help files for the language pack.

That meant that anyone installing the language pack would have malicious ad displaying code inside their browser -- which could be used for other exploits.

So the language pack did not have a Trojan. I don't think the language packs even have executable code. The language packs had help files with banner ads in them. That's not even close to what the headline says. But I guess "Vietnamese help files may contain ads" doesn't sound as scary.

(I guess this means Slashdot sensationalism isn't restricted to anti-Microsoft articles.)

Re:More Slashdot Sensationalism

[trifish]

Eh? From the article: "On Tuesday, a user named Hai-Nam Nguyen reported that anti-virus programs detected the Xorer Trojan inside the add-on. Firefox admins quickly confirmed the presence of the Trojan's code and removed the file the same day."

Not really infected

[hweimer]

According to the Mozilla Security Blog the language pack did not contain any malicious code, but only manipulated HTML files:

The Vietnamese language pack for Firefox 2 contains inserted code to load remote content. This code is the result of a virus infection, but does not contain the virus itself.

Re:Downside of OSS

[makomk]

Not really. Apparently, the trojan was a single line of code in the HTML help file, not the extension code itself, and I doubt a human would necessarily even think to check there.

Not infected

[jonasj]

The language pack was not infected with the trojan itself. It only contained some HTML code displaying ads in the help files. These were inserted BY the trojan, on the language pack contributor's infected computer, but the language pack itself only contained the ad-displaying code.

"the author's local network was infected with the virus, so it modified html files. The main virus is a Win32 program. The infected code just display annoying banner but it can't propagate." -- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=432406#c10

I'm replying to this thread to put this information at the top of the discussion because the article summary makes it sound like the language pack actually infected people's systems with the trojan.