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Try to inform you that if you search for Firefox on Bing or Google the top choice is an "Ad related to Firefox" and the link downloads malware.

  • 3 replies
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  • Last reply by NoahSUMO

nst1
nst1
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How in the world do I get in touch with the powers that be? I'm just trying to be helpful and let someone know that there is a link that pops up when searching for firefox (even when using firefox) that tries to dowload malware onto your computer. Thought someone would want to know and try and fix it. But since there's no way, that I can find, to get in touch with anyone who gets paid I'll see what happens here. At least I will have tried...

How in the world do I get in touch with the powers that be? I'm just trying to be helpful and let someone know that there is a link that pops up when searching for firefox (even when using firefox) that tries to dowload malware onto your computer. Thought someone would want to know and try and fix it. But since there's no way, that I can find, to get in touch with anyone who gets paid I'll see what happens here. At least I will have tried...

All Replies (3)

NoahSUMO
NoahSUMO
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Thank you VERY much for reporting this!

Typically you are supposed to report it here: http://www.mozilla.org/legal/fraud-report/

But I did that personally over 2 years ago in 2012 and still those sites persisted in the Google search results.

I have been trying to tell Mozilla about this but it appears they either don't believe that this is happening or when they report this serious issue to Google, Google laughs in their face and doesn't take this issue seriously.

I plan to make some big noise about this. I was going to file a bug earlier but some people I asked to do a google search for Firefox could not reproduce the "top ads" that I saw. Also I checked myself last night and could only see "downloads.yahoo.com" as the only ad result at the top. I thought the others had *finally* been removed.

The ones I would commonly see were: mozilla-firefox.ez-download.com mozilla-firefox.gol-apps.com mozilla-firefox.todownload.com and more

Screenshot: http://snag.gy/ZoRkW.jpg

In my opinion, this is really bad and has been going on for *years*. One way or another I plan to get this on Mozilla's radar. They need to get tough about this.

And let's make no mistake that Google is definitely the big reason why so many people have been blindly and accidentally installing adware/malware filled versions of Firefox. If you do a google search for Google Chrome or Internet Explorer, you see ZERO top ads. Hmm I wonder why.... /sarcasm

Could you do me a favor and take a screenshot of exactly what you see when you do a Google search? Then post a link to it here. I'll be adding that into my evidence when I state my beef. Also what country are you located in? People who were located in Europe weren't seeing the same top ads as me since I'm in the U.S. Thanks!

Modified by NoahSUMO

nst1
nst1 Question owner
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I'm in the US as well. Attached are screen shots from Google and Bing.

They really should do something about it, I got lucky that my AVG caught what was happening and stopped it.

NoahSUMO
NoahSUMO
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Thanks so much! I'll let you know about the bug I file on this and what feedback I heard from Mozilla about it.