Viruses Hit Mozilla, MP3s

Right now, virus-related problems are spreading like… well, viruses.

First up, Mozilla is admitting it made a major mistake. The Firefox developers sent out a warning today that one of the browser’s language plug-ins is infected with malicious code. The Vietnamese language pack has been found to contain the adware as a result of a virus that may have been on the developer’s network, unbeknownst to him.

“This code is the result of a virus infection, but does not contain the virus itself,” explained Mozilla Security Chief William Snyder.

“This usually results in the user seeing unwanted ads, but may be used for more malicious actions,” he added.

The bug is believed to be from the Xorer Trojan. Mozilla says it did conduct an initial scan of the program but did not catch the issue until now.

“We are also adding after-the-fact scans of everything to address this sort of case in the future,” Snyder said.

At the same time, McAfee is cautioning that it’s seen an increase in fake MP3 files being used to carry dangerous code. A security expert with the company claims 360,000 users have had problems in the past days. You can find a list of the problematic filenames to avoid on the McAfee Labs Blog.