Spyware used by governments poses as Firefox, and Mozilla is angry

Spyware used by governments poses as Firefox, and Mozilla is angry

arstechnica.com

Mozilla has sent a cease-and-desist letter to a company that sells spyware allegedly disguised as the Firefox browser to governments. The action follows a report by Citizen Lab, which identifies 36 countries (including the US) hosting command and control servers for FinFisher, a type of surveillance software.

But the spyware "uses our brand and trademarks to lie and mislead as one of its methods for avoiding detectiondeletion" and is "used by Gamma’s customers to violate citizens’ human rights

(visit the link for the full news article)

Luckily I quit Mozilla years ago, although it is not their fault that governments used their product in order to surveillance people. There exists no online privacy...

At least it came out now, although I am interested how will it affect Mozilla´s users. Many will probably quit, although I appreciate the honesty of the company to come out with something that might affect their earnings.

arstechnica.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Gamma is a UK based company. The UK is the US's biach. Essentially the US are spying on themselves, and everyone else. That isn't really news.

Honestly, everyone needs to understand if you are on an electrical device, and it networks, You can be monitored, hacked or whatever at any time, through ANY means you take to protect yourself. The security sector in this day and age is good, but it's really a HUGE marketing issue now, we don't have super awesome cars made that NEVER break since that would put many out of jobs, so we have cars made that have time changed issues on it causing us to need to buy more things and services for them. Well why wouldn't the security industry be any different, the very conception of the Pc was to be allowed to interact with it, that's all software will be able to do, allow others to interact with it if they know what they are doing. the only issue is that, someone didn't create the loopholes of defective production, it's the nature of the beast in this case, and to have a truly secure system, you need to be offline...

All it takes is a little mess up, a value interchanged, a command leading no where or a simple honest isue of doing one thing for another but in turn allowing for others to tag along.

Body implanted electronic devices that network, Dick cheny's pace maker, blood glucose monitors and defibrillators are a few devices inside peoples bodies that CAN be hacked, they have studies about this and how vulnerable humanity is to being hacked..

They are watching us.... dun dun dun..... that's why I make funny faces at my webcam and flick it off at random times..... Just to give whoever might be hacking a laugh or 2.

reply to post by Cabin


Hope you didn't switch to Chrome, at least Mozzilla aren't knowingly handing over all your data to the NSA:

www.wired.com...

"As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy." -Christopher Dawson

Originally posted by MaxSteiner
reply to post by Cabin

 

Hope you didn't switch to Chrome, at least Mozzilla aren't knowingly handing over all your data to the NSA:

www.wired.com...

Makes me think.... I watched a special on Google just a week ago, presented by one of the major news networks. They made Google look really appealing. Could be nothing more than a feature on a success story, or could be piece to get everyone on board with Google. You just never know who's doing what and why they're doing it. A paranoid mind is the price you pay for learning a bit of the cold hard truth.

Have to agree...Google freaks the hell out of me. At least Mozilla is screaming about spying. For that reason, I stick with Mozilla (as I frantically try to figure out whether or not I'm being spied upon lol).

Originally posted by Cabin
Luckily I quit Mozilla years ago, although it is not their fault that governments used their product in order to surveillance people. There exists no online privacy...

It is not Firefox software being used. The spyware added material to their product to make people think it was Firefox and therefore possibly ignore the malware. False branding.

reply to post by 2manyquestions

Sounds like their typical propaganda to me.
Kind of like how they were always saying "Google is your friend." I'd always roll my eyes when a certain Coast to Coast regular would say this.

Well, considering that I know for a fact that US Navy ships use Mozilla/Firefox (or a fake version), I honestly wouldn't be surprised! I've seen too many people get accounts suspended over visiting websites that weren't military-friendly!

Sadly, I think the days of surfing the internet without being tracked, watched, monitored are long gone.
Mozilla, IE, ACORN, Netscape, Chrome... i dunno i just get the feeling that your local browser matters not any more. They probably trace and track on the DNS/Server side anwyays.

reply to post by Cabin


Good thread, OP.

Heard about this before. Apparently the US has more servers for this software (6) than any other other country. I believe China and Britain might each have 2, and a few other countries have 1.

Also apparently with this software, the user of it can look at files on a person's computer as well as use any built in webcam -- and I assume microphone -- to spy/eavesdrop on the person.

Bad times indeed.

The thing is:... no matter what web host, or ISP you use Firefox Bing Google yahoo or others, once you start typing NSA is watching, shorting, or flagging your IP or your ISP depending on what you type email or send, and post . Use a web cam? This too is being filed, for later review. welcome to big Bro bro or sis just the way it is.

Originally posted by Agit8dChop
Sadly, I think the days of surfing the internet without being tracked, watched, monitored are long gone.
Mozilla, IE, ACORN, Netscape, Chrome... i dunno i just get the feeling that your local browser matters not any more. They probably trace and track on the DNS/Server side anwyays.

Sad but very true my friend.

reply to post by Cabin

Luckily I quit Mozilla years ago, although it is not their fault that governments used their product in order to surveillance people. There exists no online privacy...

At least it came out now, although I am interested how will it affect Mozilla´s users. Many will probably quit, although I appreciate the honesty of the company to come out with something that might affect their earnings.

That's not what the article says. It says that governments were using software, which was disguised as Mozilla software, that was actually spyware. In other words, some company was, in this case, spying on governments and not governments on us.

Firefox is Googles bitch and they are just upset that Google is not getting its cut for selling our information.

You all need to get a hardware firewall/router and to turn on outbound rules because 1/3 of internet traffic is spam and another 1/3 is chatter often using UDP by Firefox, Google, Apple, Microsoft

Also most of you will have GoogleUpdate.exe running on your machine and you need to remove it from start-up, Services and schedule tasks just to stop it.

My machines all run like lightning because I have made the effort to block these parasites using up my bandwidth and CPU time.

I can't believe people use Chrome. Google is completely in league with the spy agencies. People use gmail, google desktop, and chrome on top of that. They stay logged into Google+ and youtube and blogger through google. Every single thing they do is monitored by google. Try to find a web page that doesn't use Google analytics or some other google scripts in their code. Every single web page on the planet has given themselves over to google. You can block it all but few do. If you use gmail, youtube accounts, chrome, etc, you're crazy.. or the kind of person that doesn't care if 10,000 watch you as you use the toilet.

Edit to add: Adblock Plus, Noscript, Ghostery, Re-direct remover, HTML5 cookie manager, Better Privacy, Little Snitch on Mac, TrackerBlocker, disable all google scripts, and web search using HTTS startpage.com instead of Google. Clean out all flash/html5/cookies after each session. Cycle your IP address constantly.

reply to post by WhiteAlice

Yes at least Mozilla will "say something" to the public if it "sees something"....Google and its subsidiaries will only say something to the government and its sub agencies (ie NSA).