Posted by chris on Saturday, August 1, 2009 – 4:19 PM
Unable to attend DefCon this year, I’ve been following it on twitter. There was a talk about how insecure Firefox extensions are.
@ramereth word to the wise: DO NOT trust any firefox extension. assume they can grab and do anything including executing other code #defcon
Just one of many tweets talking about how scary the talk was. So until I can get more information on this, I’m disabling most of my Firefox extensions. Could this be Firefox’s vulnerability equivalent to Internet Explorer’s active-x? Ironically, I’ve been using Google’s Chrome browser lately. I’m liking it more and more. I was just switching back to Firefox because it has a couple extensions I use a lot. But now that they might not be safe, it looks like Chrome is going to be set as my default browser. At least until I find out more about these Firefox extension exploits.
Seeing how this talk was given today, I suspect there will soon be a rash of these exploits and figured I should pass on the info I have even though it’ sketchy at best at this point. To disable your extensions in Firefox, just go to Tools, then addons, then extensions, and uninstall or disable them.
Posted by chris on Tuesday, May 19, 2009 – 9:17 PM
First I have to admit, I did something stupid. I decided to install My Web Tattoo on my Facebook page. I knew with all the spam about this addon it would try and sneak in some kind of malware. Being the “I know how to fix anything” PC Tech that I am, I pretty much dared it to install something. Which it promptly did. It changed my default search to some crap called “Fast Browser Search.” I tried Spybot and BHO Remover, both of which found my system clean. I looked in the addons under firefox and uninstalled My Web Tatoo. Then I found that some of my search’s were still getting redirected to Fast Browser Search. So I searched my registry for Fast Browser Search and various combinations of those words. Nothing…. I searched the internet for Fast Browser Search and their site has nothing about how to remove it, big surprise. I won’t go into how it should be illegal for companies to pull this !#$!. I did find a page from the My Web Tattoo people that said you can remove it from the addons in firefox. Well I already did that, and it was still redirecting. Then I remembered the config settings in Firefox. And there it was.
Since this was such a nightmare to find and remove, I felt it was my duty to pass on this to you, my faithful readers 
Type about:config in the address bar in Firefox. In the filter, type fast. This should bring up all the instances of where Fast Browser Search has taken over. Right click on each of the Fast Browser Search entry s and select reset. This should put most of them back to google. And that’s it!
UPDATE: One of our readers, ED, has added another step
There was a few more steps i needed to do to remove it from list…in the search engine toolbar I had forgotten to click that and manage search engines as well, after the Tools/Add-on removal. Also , in the about:config area, I also typed in … fbs … in the filter section and found more fast browser search stuff in that filter set. Just in case, I reset them as well.=)
Thanks for the info Ed
MORE HELP
I figured out some more information on removing this. I can tell buy some of the replies that not everyone has seen the other posts I made later. Here is another one that might help if the above info didn’t.
more-my-web-tatto-removal-information
