Firefox Vietnamese Language Pack Infected With Trojan

An anonymous reader writes "Wired.com is reporting that the Firefox browser has been unknowingly distributing a trojan with the Firefox Vietnamese language pack. Over 16,000 downloads of the pack occurred since being infected. This highlights a risk on relying on user-submitted Firefox extensions, or a lack of peer-review of the extensions, many of which receive frequent upgrades."

infected with Trojans?

[gEvil (beta) (945888)]

So wait...It installs the Greek language pack?

Re:infected with Trojans?

[Yvan256 (722131)]

Yes, and it adds the wooden rabbit [intriguing.com] font, too.

Re:

[pragma_x (644215)]

Me, I'm already on the lookout for any updates with large wooden badgers.

Re:infected with Trojans?

[betterunixthanunix (980855)]

I guess I was the only one who thought "infected with trojans" was funny. Especially since many of the condoms I've seen are made in south Asia.

Downside of OSS

[elrous0 (869638)]

I know this isn't going to be a popular opinion here, but two of the big downsides of open source software to me are the lack of documentation and the lack of quality control. Sure, OSS has THEORETICAL quality control (because anyone can review it), but how often does that REALLY happen? If someone slipped in a virus into some OSS program (especially easy if they distribute it as a binary), how long, if ever, would it be before anyone caught it?

I'm not saying commercial software is perfect in that regard (there have been cases of commerically distributed software containing malware too), but at least there is generally some level of quality control there.

Re:

[Uncle Focker (1277658)]

The virus's signature was unknown at the time, and thus passed Mozilla's testing of add-ons.

Monster fucking fail.

Re:

[ttapper04 (955370)]

You are right. It may have something to do with the responsibility a software company has when selling you code. There are flaws in this statement, but what I mean is this:
Joe Six-pack is not going to be as upset when he gets infected by the free thing vs. the thing he had to pay for.
Is this fair to say? Can anyone say that better then me?

Re:

[Henry V .009 (518000)]

Yeah. When the hackers steal his identity and ruin his credit, he'll just be cool about it and say "Well, I still love Firefox; I got hacked, but it's not like I had to pay money for this software!."

Re:

[kilgortrout (674919)]

If someone slipped in a virus into some OSS program (especially easy if they distribute it as a binary), how long, if ever, would it be before anyone caught it?

Less than three months according to the article.

Re:Downside of OSS

[jrumney (197329)]

In fact, it is more like less than one month, since the other two months is attributable to the delay in anti-virus vendors recognizing the trojan.

Re:Downside of OSS

[Uncle Focker (1277658)]

So was Mozilla using a proprietary anti-virus software? Better hope not, or the ggp is going to have his entire point demolished.

Re:

[Uncle Focker (1277658)]

but at least there is generally some level of quality control there

Hahahahahahaha. You must not deal with much proprietary software to make such hilarious statements. In fact it my experience the statement is just the opposite.

Re:Downside of OSS

[Spy der Mann (805235)]

The majority of OSS is half-finished, poorly-planned crap that is in perpetual beta.

In my experience (and I've held long debates with friends and colleagues about this) this has been caused by plain and simple pride. i.e. what happened with Pidgin - developers imposing their own viewpoints on their software for no valid reason.

That, and the language/OS elitism. A lot of abandoned projects in sourceforge are developed in an obscure scripting language and/or extension that requires very, VERY careful installation (i.e. wxPython - choose the wrong version and you'll end up in a support nightmare), or perhaps use a specific UI toolkit (perhaps even proprietary *cough cough* cinelerra *cough cough*) that keeps crashing and crashing. I remember when I tried to install GAIM in Windows. It sucked big time. You can't just design something as "cross-platform" if you don't do extensive testing on ALL operating systems, and that includes the Redmond Nightmare.

I believe that a lot of OSS developers program for selfish reasons - i.e. "I'm programming a tool that does what I want" instead of "I'm programming a tool that will help people who might not use my OS or won't share my personal tastes, therefore I need to think about them".

The lesson: It's not really the OS or the toolkit, or even the language used. It's the attitude of the developers that ruins projects.

Re:Downside of OSS

[Keyper7 (1160079)]

Open source allows greater quality control than closed source. If Mozilla did not use this potential, it's their fault and not the open source process'. In fact, the problem here is that the quality control used by Mozilla was not open source enough. They only did automatic scanning, something that can be done in compiled binaries, when a simple code-checking (notice that an extension source is not that big) would get the malicious code rather quickly.

Re:Downside of OSS

[dave420 (699308)]

Open source means the QA can be shifted from a group of QA workers in an office to people who use the software. Both approaches work, and both are not perfect. Saying one is inherently better than the other is a bit strange, as they both achieve the same thing, only in different places. QA performed in-house has access to the source code, and can highlight errors and get them fixed, just the same as any OSS project. The only difference is the QA workers are getting paid for it, and are working directly with the developers. I'm not saying that's better, it's just what happens.

Re:

[gnuman99 (746007)]

It is a double edged sword. I speak as a developer and user of Debian.

On one side, the possibility of getting infected binaries are dropped in Debian. Things are signed, etc.

On the flip side, there is a much higher possibility of getting malicious code in the source code. Considering the number of possible code "contributions" and unverified source code changes (at upstream, at maintainer, etc.), the possibility of getting malicious code in one of the less known projects is higher than closed source. Then a

Re:Downside of OSS

[peragrin (659227)]

right quality control in closed source. bullshite.

How many refurburished ipods have had viruses on them/ How many sb thumb drives with custom controls and drivers have had viruses on them? How may times has MSFT released a service pack only to pull it a day or two later because 50% of the installs would fail horribly?

OSS has a far better track record on quality control. Even better OSS software knows exactly how many times it has been downloaded and releases the exact date at which the infection happened. That is information that is NEVER released by closed source companies.

OSS is far from perfect, but it has a much better track record than closed source software. And when it does fail, everything about the failure is spelled out in details so that particular failure is less likely to happen. Unlike closed companies whose own management don't even know what really happened.

Re:

[urcreepyneighbor (1171755)]

How many refurburished ipods have had viruses on them/ How many sb thumb drives with custom controls and drivers have had viruses on them? How may times has MSFT released a service pack only to pull it a day or two later because 50% of the installs would fail horribly?

Yeah, see, but... you can hold companies responsible. Who will be held responsible for this trojan? Hm? With the Sony rootkit, we knew. With OSS, "some guy that posted it" just doesn't cut it.

Re:Downside of OSS

[betterunixthanunix (980855)]

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA [fedoraproject.org]

We have quality control also. Also, this language pack trojan was caught early on...

Re:

[cyfer2000 (548592)]

So company or organization supported OSS projects with proper QA is the solution.

Re:Downside of OSS

[RiotingPacifist (1228016)]

The Downside is when the project gets too big, the number of users >>> developers so resources get stretched to try and satisfy the large number of users and the quality of the project drops.

Re:

[TheVelvetFlamebait (986083)]

Open Source should be treated with care, just like any other software you download from the net. Stick to the lighted paths and generally you should be fine. In this case, we have user-generated code which can be iffy, but you can feel fairly safe if it has been downloaded and used a number of times. These things usually come out into the open sooner or later.

Re:Downside of OSS

[JustinOpinion (1246824)]

To be fair, this particular sequence of events could have happened to a proprietary product as well. The article explains that an add-on developer uploaded a new version of the language pack. The language pack was automatically scanned for viruses, and found to be clean (since the signature for this particular Trojan wasn't yet known). It appears that this occurred because the developer's computer was infected (i.e.: this was accidental, not intentional, on the part of the contributor).

This isn't too different from a hypothetical employee whose home computer is infected, and who is working from home and emails a module to his boss, who merges it into the final product. If his home computer was infected, and the standard virus scans missed it, then the final product could end up having Trojan code buried inside.

Would the company necessarily have caught the Trojan? Doubtful. They, too, would probably not have done a line-by-line review of each module update that is submitted.

So I'm not convinced this can be pointed to as a failing of the OSS development model per se. The only difference is that the OSS user contributor is perhaps less well-known (less trustworthy?) to the distributors than in a corporate setting. (But, again, this wasn't a problem of trust... this was a contributor machine being infected. And I assure you that corporate developers can and do get their machines infected.)

Nevertheless, this points to a breakdown in Mozilla's auditing practices. They should be very careful with any code they distribute. But these kinds of quality-control breakdowns occur in OSS projects and corporations, too. (One could tangentially argue that at least with OSS, breaches are likely to be publicized, whereas companies will frequently try to suppress information that points out a security breach.)

Re:Downside of OSS

[Paradise Pete (33184)]

I'm not saying commercial software is perfect in that regard (there have been cases of commerically distributed software containing malware too), but at least there is generally some level of quality control there.

Creative MP3 players ship with virus [theregister.co.uk]
Apple Ships iPods with Windows Virus [betanews.com]
Seagate Storage Units Ship with Virus [eweek.com]
Sega Dreamcast console game spreads virus [findarticles.com]
Maxtor USB Hard Drives Ship Virus Infected [everythingusb.com]
Digital photo frames ship with computer virus [itrportal.com]
Sony Ships Rootkit [schneier.com]

Re:

[Hatta (162192)]

Nice troll. There are 34 comments on this article, and 13 of them are in response to your post. That's over 1/3 of the discussion so far. Excellent work.

Re:

[elrous0 (869638)]

Since the popular definition of troll seems to be "Anyone who posts anything that I disagree with," I shall label you a troll as well.

Re:

[_Sprocket_ (42527)]

I'm not saying commercial software is perfect in that regard (there have been cases of commerically distributed software containing malware too), but at least there is generally some level of quality control there.

Quality control fails in the proprietary software world (aside - OSS is commercial as well) but hey... at least it's there! Meanwhile, this particular case is supposed to be an example of how OSS has no quality control? And we see the same failures in the quality-controlled proprietary world? I'm not following your logic.

You ask how long it would take to find a virus slipped in to an OSS program? Interesting question. A little bit of Googling would show where major OSS projects were compromised and

Re:Downside of OSS

[ericlondaits (32714)]

I guess the point is: "the fact that anyone could check the source code at any time should not replace proper QA, which shouldn't be all that different from the one done on commercial software".

I'm sure that Firefox has quite a bit of QA done to it... but it's usefulness relies too much on extensions, which we don't that many assurances about.

Re:

[Uncle Focker (1277658)]

I'm guessing you didn't read the article. The breakdown came with the fact that the signature of the trojan was unknown at the time it was uploaded and so the anti-virus scan on the extension came up clean. This had nothing to do with a failure of OSS but with the fact that at the time it was an unknown trojan.

Re:Downside of OSS

[makomk (752139)]

Not really. Apparently, the trojan was a single line of code in the HTML help file, not the extension code itself, and I doubt a human would necessarily even think to check there.

Re:Downside of OSS

[AshtangiMan (684031)]

So it's like when you park your car in your garage at night. In the morning you don't look in the trunk to make sure that i) no one put a hostage/ dead body in there; ii) no one removed a hostage/ dead body; or iii) the spare tire is in good working condition. While it is possible, and recommended that you do so, there is no guarantee that everyone does this.

Re:Downside of OSS

[by Anonymous Coward]

What kind of messed up place do you live where it's recommended you check the trunk for dead bodies?

Re:

[sqlrob (173498)]

The entire nature of open source forces it to make sure peer review is enforced , because of the danger

Right, sure it is. How long was the exploitable double free in zlib? It was what, a year and a half before a PLAIN TEXT password was found in firebird?

Re:Downside of OSS

[Knuckles (8964)]

The difference is that in the closed source world something as basic as a language pack would come with the same QA that the program...

To be fair, most closed source software not not come with a Vietnamese language pack at all.

How do you say "oops" in Vietnamese?

[davidwr (791652)]

I'm sure the Mozilla Foundation wants to know.

Although this shows that Open Source is also...

[Assmasher (456699)]

...vulnerable to these sorts of attacks (which anyone with any common sense would already know), the fact that it is such an open process means a greater possibility of earlier detection, faster analysis and response, and the rapid repair of the process which made such a gaffe possible. In the closed source world most of these steps would take exponentially longer, and quite often the process would remain the same.

Proprietary software has the same risk

[jrumney (197329)]

This has nothing to do with Mozilla accepting user-submitted extensions. If anything, that makes them more careful about what they publish. A developer's machine becoming infected with an as yet unknown virus that is undetected by anti-virus scanners is a risk that every software producer faces. How many commercial software vendors even run their developers' code through a virus check when it is committed, let alone running regular anti-virus checks on software they have already released?

Ignore this

[by Anonymous Coward]

post. removing incorrect mod.

Its a conspiracy

[RiotingPacifist (1228016)]

I think RMS did this on purpose to make those users of proprietary Operating systems pay!

More Slashdot Sensationalism

[MobyDisk (75490)]

The article says:

...That Trojan inserted a banner-ad displaying script into any html file on his system, which included the help files for the language pack.

That meant that anyone installing the language pack would have malicious ad displaying code inside their browser -- which could be used for other exploits.

So the language pack did not have a Trojan. I don't think the language packs even have executable code. The language packs had help files with banner ads in them. That's not even close to what the headline says. But I guess "Vietnamese help files may contain ads" doesn't sound as scary.

(I guess this means Slashdot sensationalism isn't restricted to anti-Microsoft articles.)

Re:More Slashdot Sensationalism

[trifish (826353)]

Eh? From the article: "On Tuesday, a user named Hai-Nam Nguyen reported that anti-virus programs detected the Xorer Trojan inside the add-on. Firefox admins quickly confirmed the presence of the Trojan's code and removed the file the same day."

Not really infected

[hweimer (709734)]

According to the Mozilla Security Blog [mozilla.com] the language pack did not contain any malicious code, but only manipulated HTML files:

The Vietnamese language pack for Firefox 2 contains inserted code to load remote content. This code is the result of a virus infection, but does not contain the virus itself.

Re:

[trifish (826353)]

From the article: "On Tuesday, a user named Hai-Nam Nguyen reported that anti-virus programs detected the Xorer Trojan inside the add-on. Firefox admins quickly confirmed the presence of the Trojan's code and removed the file the same day."

Re:

[Burpmaster (598437)]

"Firefox admins quickly confirmed the presence of the Trojan's code"

That would be the HTML code that places the ad, not the trojan itself.

Trojans and viruses on commercial CDs

[argent (18001)]

There have been a number of incidents of trojans and viruses being distributed in commercial shrinkwrapped software. Firefox was slack, like commercial distributors have now and then been slack. You get caught by surprise, fix the process, and keep going, and keep it from happening again.

If they don't address the process that caused the problem, then start worrying.

Author of the lang pack notified

[The MAZZTer (911996)]

He posted on [url=https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=432406]the bugzilla post[/url] saying he's preparing a cleaned pack. Apparently his computer was infected with the trojan which infected the lang pack files.

It's noteworthy that the actual trojan isn't in the files... just the code which does the advertising stuff, I think. It can't propagate from these files. Since it took so long to be detected it's possible the infected code doesn't work (after all it was intended for HTML documents and not language packs) but this is just personal speculation.

MOD PARENT DOWN

[SteveFoerster (136027)]

This was modded funny? If OP had called them a derogatory term would it have been modded insightful? What a disgrace.

Not infected

[jonasj (538692)]

The language pack was not infected with the trojan itself. It only contained some HTML code displaying ads in the help files. These were inserted BY the trojan, on the language pack contributor's infected computer, but the language pack itself only contained the ad-displaying code.

"the author's local network was infected with the virus, so it modified html files. The main virus is a Win32 program. The infected code just display annoying banner but it can't propagate." -- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=432406#c10 [mozilla.org]

I'm replying to this thread to put this information at the top of the discussion because the article summary makes it sound like the language pack actually infected people's systems with the trojan.

A rebuttal

[Bragador (1036480)]

Your reasoning is flawed.

You are coming to the conclusion that open source "sucks" because a trojan was supplied with one version of Mozilla Firefox. The problem with that reasoning is twofold:

1) The problem was detected nonetheless

2) It is being fixed rather quickly

Another problem with your reasoning is that you jump to saying "Long live microsoft!". While I applaud you for sharing your love, the link between a competitor's browser having a problem and your love of Microsoft is quite shallow.

For example,

Re:

[Knuckles (8964)]

if IE is safer in that regard, then there you go.

Yeah, sure. We have constant trojan infections at our company, probably stemming from users visiting myspace with IE6.

That does not excuse the FF problem, though.