Mozilla admits malware false alarm

 

Gallery

By Stuart Turton

Posted on 11 Feb 2010 at 11:04

Mozilla has admitted that one of the Firefox add-ons it accused of containing malware was actually innocent.

Last week, Mozilla announced that Sothink Web Video Downloader 4.0 and the Master Filer add-ons were loaded with the Bifrose Trojan, which is designed to hijack PCs.

The incident was particularly embarrassing for Mozilla, as its scanning tool failed to detect the two-year-old Trojan during the upload process. However, the foundation has now retracted the claim against Sothink Web Video Downloader 4.0, admitting that it was wrong about the add-on.

"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," the foundation says on its blog.

"The Sothink Video Downloader has been re-enabled. We apologise to our users and the developers of Sothink for any inconvenience this has caused," the post adds.

However, while Sothink was cleared, Mozilla reiterated that Master File did contain a Trojan. The company has revised its estimate of infected downloads of the trojans down from 6,000 to under 700.