I've got spyware!!??

Dave McCammon davemac11 at yahoo.com
Thu Feb 23 07:43:15 PST 2006



--- Garrett Cooper <youshi10 at u.washington.edu> wrote:

> On Feb 23, 2006, at 12:19 AM, Joseph Vella wrote:
> 
> > I just installed flash in Firefox.  I was playing
> around with the
> > autoscrolling feature, when all of a sudden some
> ugly website pops  
> > up.  It
> > was something I clicked with the mouse wheel.  I
> tried it again and  
> > sure
> > enough the same site pops up.  It was kind of
> tricky to do. I had  
> > to be
> > scrolling and then click real fast.  I found that
> if I turned off the
> > autoscrolling, anytime I clicked in the browser
> window with the  
> > mouse wheel
> > this site would come up.  On a couple of occasions
> a page within the
> > Microsoft site would come up instead.
> >
> > I deleted the mozilla directory in my home
> directory.  After that  
> > the first
> > three clicks of my mouse wheel would cause the
> Microsoft page to  
> > come up,
> > after that the other site would come up.
> >
> > How could there be spyware on my FreeBSD computer
> and how do I get  
> > rid of it?
> 
> Not sure if this is true for FreeBSD, but try
> deleting the  
> ~/.macromedia directory and see what happens. This
> may remove any  
> unwanted cached flash apps.
> Interesting though. If this persists, someone may
> have found and  
> exploited a security issue with Flash =\...
> -Garrett

I think it is something in Firefox. I see the same
thing. When the middle mouse button is clicked on a
page, it goes to a seemingly random page.(Notice
seemingly)

It looks like it can be disable by typeing
"about:config" in the address bar of firefox and
changing the middlemouse.contentloadurl to false.

Also, google "middlemouse.contentloadurl" for what it
does. It has something to do with loading clipboard
contents as URL. 
Read
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=216899.
There is a mention of a "Google "I'm Feeling Lucky""
search being done, which may be what you are seeing.

Dave

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