 | By Mark Joseph Edwards Criminal Web sites are sneaky enough now to detect the operating system and browser you’re using and tailor specific attacks against them. If you’re using the Firefox browser, however, I’ll show you an easy eay to foil almost all such threats. |
Fool MPack attackers by changing Firefox
Have you heard about the MPack intrusion tool? In a nutshell, MPack runs on a hacked Web site and waits for unsuspecting users to visit. The program then detects the browser you’re using, along with the operating system you’re running. It then launches attacks that are designed to work against both your browser and your OS.
That level of intelligence is a slick tactic, but it’s also a gaping weakness. By simply adjusting your browser, you can fool MPack into thinking, for example, that you’re running Linux instead of Windows. Any Linux-specific attacks that MPack throws at your system are likely to fail.
The reason that it’s possible to fool MPack is because every browser sends Web servers a “user-agent” string. This identifier includes the user’s browser type and version, the operating system, and more. Using a simple tool, you can adjust the user-agent string to be anything you want.
To do so, install a copy of User Agent Switcher for Firefox. It comes preconfigured to report Firefox’s identity as any of three different browsers: Internet Explorer 7.0, Netscape 4.8, or Opera 9.2. You can also add your own custom user-agent strings.
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