Malware Advertising Warning

I was looking at the Statcounter website earlier and watch my browser page refresh to show me an advertisement. That’s annoying behavior, but one that, unfortunately, is becoming more and more common on the web when I’m not running an Ad-blocker. What was much more than just annoying, however was what the “advertisement” actually was.

Yes, that is malware disguised as an update to Firefox.

If you see this screen, that is not how Firefox does updates, do not download the file, and close the browser tab. In my case, it was also identified as malware by my security tools and blocked, but don’t be fooled.

Be careful out there.

Oh and website operators, if you want to continue running ads, and want to try and persuade people using ad-blockers about the need for you to make money from those ads to stay in business, you might want to be more careful too. Being infected because of your ad network is a great way to convince people to protect themselves anyway possible, and put yourself out of business.

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