Web Video downloader is malware free
Red-faced execs from the Mozilla Foundation had to back down on claims that two
add-ons contained malware and had been removed from their add-on Web
site.
One of them at least is proving to be totally free of any malware. Mozilla said
that the company had worked with McAfee and determined that the Sothink Web
Video Downloader is malware-free. To make matters worse Mozilla had predicted that 6,000 people had been
affected by the malware downloads. It turns out that there were only 700.
Mozilla stated that during the re-testing process that cleared the Sothink
add-on, the other add-on thought to be infected, Master Filer, was confirmed
again as containing a Trojan. The Sothink add-on has been re-added to AMO as
well as CNET Download.com. Nick Nguyen, Mozilla's Add-ons Director, said that the incident that uncovered
Master Filer began when a user running an antivirus program from Eset threw up
a warning.
"All add-ons uploaded to AMO are reviewed for malware with automated
tools," he said. "ClamAV failed to detect the Trojan in Master Filer
which caused us to re-evaluate our toolset. After upgrading our process, we
rescanned the remaining 58,000 files on AMO and detected one additional
instance of malware," which was the Sothink add-on.
Master Filer and Sothink Web Video Downloader were add-ons labelled as
"experimental," which means that users had to have an account at AMO
to download them and that they could only be downloaded directly from the
Mozilla site, but he also said last week that only one version, v4.0, of the
Sothink downloader was found to be infected.