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How can I uninstall a Firefox.exe patch (from liirawynagrodzenia.net); I have not restarted Firefox to update?

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  • Last reply by James

pij585
pij585
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Hi-

Thinking the above patch was ligit, I downloaded and installed to make the little box go away (without thinking). I am getting a little box now telling me to restart FireFox in order to update. Since FireFox has not been updated, is there some way to remove this file? I have FireFox 47.0. I have never gotten any bad stuff on my computer before. I am only using Norton AntiVirus. Would appreciate any assistance. Thank you!

Hi- Thinking the above patch was ligit, I downloaded and installed to make the little box go away (without thinking). I am getting a little box now telling me to restart FireFox in order to update. Since FireFox has not been updated, is there some way to remove this file? I have FireFox 47.0. I have never gotten any bad stuff on my computer before. I am only using Norton AntiVirus. Would appreciate any assistance. Thank you!

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James
James
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No it is not legit.

The scammers are hoping to trick inexperienced Windows and or Firefox users into downloading and running this fake .exe without scanning first.

The fake firefox-patch/firefox-update .exe can install things like trojans, viruses or unwanted software based on past reports.

The desktop Firefox is not just for Windows as it is for Mac OSX and Linux also so .exe would not be an effective way to send out Firefox updates. The updates are done internally in Firefox (with a .mar type of file) or by download from mozilla.org like say www.mozilla.org/firefox/all/

Even if Mozilla were to use .exe for Firefox updates on Windows, they would be serving them from a *.mozilla.org url and not from random websites with weird names.

Report fake Firefox updates sites like this as "distributing modified Firefox/malware" at https://www.mozilla.org/legal/fraud-report/ (url is at bottom of many mozilla.org sites) and Google may block if reported enough at https://www.google.com/safebrowsing/report_phish/ which can be accessed by Help > Report Web Forgery in Firefox.

Also could be reported as spam abuse at say http://publicdomainregistry.com/report-abuse-2/ since they have been the Registrar of these fake Firefox updates scam sites.

I have a thread about these sites serving a fake firefox-update/firefox-patch .exe at https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/712056

James
James
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If you did run this fake firefox-patch.exe then you may have installed some form of malware. Not certain on what since there have been several different .exe with same file names such as firefox-patch.exe and firefox-update.exe used for the same scam purpose.

You can try these free programs to scan for malware, which work with your existing antivirus software:

Microsoft Security Essentials is a good permanent antivirus for Windows 7/Vista/XP if you don't already have one. Windows 8 has antivirus built-in already.

Further information can be found in the Troubleshoot Firefox issues caused by malware article.

Modified by James