Security, Technology

Fake Firefox Adobe Flash Player

September 4, 2009

File this under the ‘Yikes’ category: According to a post on Sophos website, there is a Firefox plugin masquerading as a legitimate Adobe Flash Player add on.

Recently, Sophos analysts have discovered a piece of malware masquerading itself as a flash player plugin for the Firefox browser (detected by Sophos as Troj/FFSpy-A).
When the file runs, it pretends to install the adobe flash player for your browser.

However, instead of giving you a Flash Player, you get a piece of malware that spies on your Google searches, sends that data to a remote server and then displays ads into what you are viewing based on the keywords you entered.
According to the post on Sophos’ website, this malware seems to be spreading via Internet forums.  You probably won’t have to worry about things like this if you download any plugins directly from Mozilla’s website (but you should still be cautious).
On Sophos’ website, there are some screenshots that illustrate the difficulty you would have trying to determine whether or not you were installing a legit plugin versus one containing some type of malware.
If you want to test your installed version of Flash, you can visit the test page setup on Adobe’s website and you can download the current version of Flash from Adobe’s website as well.

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