The Internet can be dangerous - have a back up browser

[malada]

Spent a little time at my mother in law's fixing a weird problem. She apparently clicked on a poisoned link which put up a scary warning about her computer being attacked by a virus, showed her a number from 'Microsoft' to call and locked up Firefox. If you shut down Firefox and start it up again it goes right back to that screen.

Yeah... no. Although I was tempted to call the number and give the scammer a runaround and waste their time.

Fortunately, Chrome was also installed on the system and we were able to download a fresh install of Firefox. CCleaner was used to uninstall the old one and clean out the Registry and any other funny bits that might have been left behind. After running Malwarebytes and a fresh install of Firefox all was well.

I'm so glad I'm a linux user.

-m

Comments

[marahmarie]

CCleaner doesn't really do a great job of cleaning out the registry, if that's what you're after. It will mostly remove references to shortcuts, program files, app data and so on. Manually checking the registry for and removing any references to Mozilla and Firefox is your best bet every time, though with the reinstall it's too late now to do that, it'd just fubar everything.

Is your Linux install protected from becoming infected by websites that download trojanware as soon as you load a rogue page? Is the F/OSS version of Firefox any safer than the Windows version is by default? Just curious.

[malada]

As far as I know, the F/OSS version of Firefox is not any safer than the Windows version, but Linux itself is a bit harder to crack into if your browser is attacked.

And you *definitely* do not want to call random phone numbers that pop on your screen offering to 'clean' your system. After they get you to download a remote access program they clean out your bank account.

There's tons of Youtube channels who set up a virtual machine in their computer to run a false Windows system then call up the scammers and reverse hack into their systems... you just mess with them. I find it amusing but I can't be bothered personally.

-m

[marahmarie]

but Linux itself is a bit harder to crack into if your browser is attacked

But is it? Or is it just security through obscurity - no one uses Linux, so no one knows how to crack it ("no one" meaning "comparatively speaking", of course; plenty of people/admins/IT folks/hackers/websites of course do use it).

Apple used to pride itself on the same thing - being hard to crack - until this year when that blew up in their faces. Security through (relative) obscurity doesn't give me much more warm fuzzies than everyone and their brother knowing how to crack Windows does, in the long run.

And you *definitely* do not want to call random phone numbers that pop on your screen offering to 'clean' your system. After they get you to download a remote access program they clean out your bank account.

Yeah, well aware of that, but thanks.

[malada]

Linux security doesn't come from obscurity - but from being a panopticonic sytem: there's a *lot* of eyeballs watching the code.

The code is open - anyone can look at it and determine what it's used for. If things go off the rails the developers are all over it like white on rice.

Although Linux is not a commonly used as a desktop it is used in server systems. With companies like Red Hat providing services, configuration and monitoring to go with their code a major company can use Linux comfortably for their back end systems. A lot of web servers use Linux.

I started using it because every time I upgraded to a new Windows another version would come out a short time later. This was during the 98 - 2k - ME - XP version 1 time frame. Linux does most of what I need to do inexpensively and mostly without fuss.

It's good to have choices.

-m