Mozilla Wrongly Accused Sothink Addon of Malware

eldavojohn writes "Mozilla has admitted to wrongly accusing Sothink of distributing a video downloader with a trojan virus as a Firefox addon. From their official blog: 'We've worked with security experts and add-on developers to determine that the suspected trojan in Version 4.0 of Sothink Video Downloader was a false positive and the extension does not include malware.' Before you go download that addon, however, keep in mind that Sothink has come under fire before for GPL violations and dishonesty."

Comments

Trojan Virus?

[Anarke_Incarnate]

Not more of this shit again.... A Trojan Horse is NOT a virus. It IS malware, but a virus tends to replicate and trojan horses do not, on their own. A trojan horse is just a program is the infection (In that it does something other than wanted or specified, and does so intentionally)

Re:Trojan Virus?

[mamer-retrogamer]

You are waging a losing battle my friend. Just as the distinction between the terms "hacker" and "cracker" has been lost upon wider usage, "virus" has now come to mean any type of malware.

Re:Trojan Virus?

[Alwin Henseler]

a virus tends to replicate and trojan horses do not, on their own.

How weird... I recently dealt with an infected system where a trojan (2 different ones, in fact) copied itself onto an USB stick, without user intervention.

IIRC a virus usually tries to replicate itself without user action, or the user noticing. A trojan OTOH 'rides along' with another program that is intentionally run by a user. So the virus may come in on its own, the trojan arrives in 'useful' program+trojan packages. After infection, the trojaned program may place executables on the system that behave like a virus (further blurring the distinction). Isn't a program like this called a dropper or something?

Re:Trojan Virus?

[Spad]

These days you've got malware that is a trojan (to get onto your machine) and a virus (to spread itself to all your facebook friends, email contacts & embed itself on your USB key) and a worm (to spread itself around your LAN), which will zombie your machine to send spam and conduct DDoS attacks, keylog to steal your bank and WoW credentials and try to get you to buy fake AV software to get both your cash and personal info.

To say the lines between trojans, viruses, worms and spyware are blurry is a serious understatement.

Re:Trojan Virus?

[Ihmhi]

In my day, a trojan horse was a goddamned wooden tank full of angry ninja soldiers.

Re:Trojan Virus?

[Low Ranked Craig]

All I know is the Internet is that little blue roundish e thing on my desktop.

Re:Trojan Virus?

[Hurricane78]

What gave you the idea, that we care what the general public thinks about our area of expertise?
Are you so weak, that you bow to a stream of loud idiots saying that 2+2=5?

We define what a virus is. We define what a cracker and a hacker is. Like professionals in any other profession.
There is no battle, so we can’t lose. I’m still calling anyone calling a cracker a hacker somebody who got no fuckin’ clue. Including you, if you do so. Period.

Re:Nice apology... sort of.

[Anonymous Coward]

The qualifier was added only in the summary. The quoted part is just: 'We've worked with security experts and add-on developers to determine that the suspected trojan in Version 4.0 of Sothink Video Downloader was a false positive and the extension does not include malware.'

Re:ie *

[The MAZZTer]

Intentionally misleading and making a mistake are two different things.

Re:Bad news is bad news.

[Linuxmonger]

Sorry, but I'd rather have ALL the information up front to make a fully educated decision.

Bullshit

If you had ALL of the information to make an educated decision, you'd spend years reading the tracking information on the product, then the product wouldn't be available anymore.

I bought an EMC Clarion once, it came with hundreds of pages of documentation, which I skimmed. Two years later, we lost a couple drives, EMC replaced them, problem solved, turns out that one of the chips on the drives had a known failure, but it wasn't known at the time of manufacture.

There are hundreds of chips in your PC, do you want to pay the expense of tracking every one? Do you have any idea what that would cost? I buy hundred dollar motherboards, for me to research every product of every sub-company that has a component on that MB would take hundreds of hours of work, it isn't worth it for a product that isn't directly involved with life support

Re:Bad news is bad news.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, not every chip, but it might be worth it to check that your computer doesn't have the components that are most likely to fail. I currently warn customers against the following components: -known defective nvidia chipsets (especially on laptops since they are on the motherboard) -seagate hard-drives that have the perpendicular writing tech (extremely high failure rate) -list of motherboards with known bad capacitors -hp home products (office are fine, but the home products are such crud that they inevitably break a week after the 1 year warranty) -dell (except servers) proprietary drivers make re-installation more difficult for end users and they don't notify customers about products that have known defects. Case in point: nvidia video cards above. While apple, hp and others extended warranties by 3 years on affected GPUs and posted technical documents dell's only acknowledgment is in a couple buried blog posts, and when a customer with an affected unit called they said it was the operating system (vista) to avoid having to honor the extended warranty. The video has since failed completely and is no longer covered by their measly 1 year extension despite him having called to complain while it was still in effect

Still might be Malware!

[canajin56]

Whenever you use the downloader, it goes to their website to display a "Download Started" page, and passes the URL you downloaded as a parameter. Do they have logs enabled on their webserver? I dunno. Better safe than sorry though. Just use FlashGot, the GPL plugin they stole all their code from.