Someone is distributing fake versions of my app with malware

Re:Someone is distributing fake versions of my app with malware by redwards510 on Friday April 10, 2015 @06:27PM (#9357444)

I feel like the the odds of you finding a HN user with a malicious addon is pretty low compared to other places. Have you tried the firefox addons forums? Users often describe issues there and you may have a thread dedicated to your addon (or you can start one).

Another place you might be able to reach out to are AV vendors like Kaspersky. From what I understand they index and hash nearly every file on a users computer to compare to a master database. Maybe you can ask them to search for a file name and where it occurs geographically.

I wonder if someone is trading warez in exchange for installing a "free ad blocker!" (your addon converted to malware). I've seen things like that before.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Someone is distributing fake versions of my app with malware by redwards510 on Friday April 10, 2015 @06:38PM (#9357488)

Now that I read more about your app I can see why criminals would want to subvert it. You are replacing the top (ad) search result on every search engine with one that has been verified by sitetruth.com. If I were a criminal I would love to slightly modify your code to point to my own ad server, thus letting me earn affiliate bucks. Then install the addon via drive-by download. The users wouldn't remember installing it, but they might not remove it either, due to the pleasant-sounding name.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Someone is distributing fake versions of my app with malware by _asummers on Saturday April 11, 2015 @11:53AM (#9359688)

Is this not the same vector used for the GitHub DDOS, just in a slightly different form?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Someone is distributing fake versions of my app with malware by kokozom on Saturday April 11, 2015 @06:22AM (#9359028)

Maybe installation was done by Firefox add-on updates?

[ Parent | on HN ]