A public service warning! You surf the internet at random using FireFox (which generally you should), you may stumble across a website, which could infest your machine with a virus. But this is nothing new, I have heard about these evil websites full of Trojans and other nasty viruses and I know better… I hear you cry. Apparently, this particular attack does not require a download. Which means that is unlikely to be trapped by your anti-virus software, certainly in the short-term.
Protecting yourself for now is fairly simple. You will need to make a trivial modification to your FireFox settings.
To do this, start FireFox, enter the URL “about:config”, scroll down, and for each of the following entries make sure it is set to “true”.
If it isn’t, right-click the line and choose “Toggle”, which will set the value to “true”
network.protocol-handler.warn-external-default
network.protocol-handler.warn-external.mailto
network.protocol-handler.warn-external.news
network.protocol-handler.warn-external.nntp
network.protocol-handler.warn-external.snewsThis will at least give you a warning that Firefox is being asked to do something suspicious; you will have to judge for yourself whether it is nasty.
Thanks to Alec Muffett and Geoff Arnold for the heads up and advice.
al
on Aug 5th, 2007
@ 7:19 am:
terrifying…and thanks…