[Tfug] My Opera browser has malware

[Quag7]

On Friday 05 January 2007 10:20 pm, Ranjan Grover wrote:
> > Hey guess what, that worked!
>
> Well I'm glad it worked out. Also, Trustwatch and PhishTank both
> report mediaplex.com as a trusted website, so chances are there wasn't
> any malware/spyware... these things are quite unusual in LInux.
> Chances are they'll hit Firefox/IceWeasel before Opera purely because
> of Browser marketshare. AFAIK, Opera has < 1% of the browser market.
>
> Ranjan

I went through an interesting experience recently.  My Firefox, on Gentoo, 
kept popping up this nag to install a product called DriveCleaner.  It 
wouldn't go away.

Something happened on my hosting provider's server, where all of my HTML files 
(and some jpegs) had a bunch of HTML with iframe tags appended on to them 
(the text had been catted >> to the html and to the jpegs). By simply going 
to any page on my site, somehow, my browser got "infected" with an annoying 
popup nag every second or third site I visited.

Even if I closed down firefox, deleted any directories related to it, this 
stupid nagging popup would still appear.

Eventually I tracked it down to the .macromedia directory in my home 
directory - I don't know much about Flash, but it installed a file in that 
directory that was causing the problem.  I deleted .macromedia, and that 
fixed the problem.

It was a nuisance more than a full-bore security problem, but I figured I'd 
mention this in case anyone else experiences the DriveCleaner issue.  As with 
the other issue that was being discussed, most information about cleaning it 
out is for Windows.  

Certainly cleaning it was more trivial in Linux than it is in Windows.