Mozilla has temporarily taken Firefox Send offline, so that the company can make the service less attractive for malware abuse. For example, users did not have to have an account and were unable to report abuse, which meant that Send was often used by criminals.
ZDNet writes that Mozilla took Firefox Send Offline on Tuesday after the news site contacted Mozilla. According to research by ZDNet, the service was actively exploited by cyber criminals. The criminals would upload the malware to Firefox Send, where the file was stored encrypted. Criminals were then able to send Send malware links to victims. This would spread, among other things, ransomware, trojans and spyware.
In an interview with ZDNet, security researcher Colin Hardy says that Firefox Send is attractive to cyber criminals because, for example, companies trust the Send URLs. As a result, spam filters would not block Send links. In addition, criminals do not have to invest time and money in developing storage services themselves, but can use the Mozilla servers. Mozilla also encrypts Send files, making malware detection difficult. Finally, Send download links can be set to expire after a certain number of clicks or after a certain amount of time and be password protected, making incident response difficult, Hardy said.
Mozilla tells ZDNet to temporarily take the service offline, so that it can make improvements to the platform. For example, it should soon be possible for Send users to report abuse of the platform and all users who want to share files via Firefox Send will soon have to log in with a Firefox account. The tech company also says to look further at additional possible solutions. It is not yet known when Firefox Send will return. All Send links are no longer usable due to taking the service offline.
Firefox Send was completed in March 2019 removed from beta and has since been available to everyone. The use of an account was not mandatory, but who logged in could upload larger files. Those who logged in could share files of up to 2.5GB, without an account the limit was 1GB. Mozilla is committed to privacy and security with Firefox Send.
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