News A new Firefox exploit locks you out of your browser

I don't see how perfectly legitimate sites would be caught up in this attack unless there is some issue with either the sites, their ad servers or the user's computer. Surely someone has to instigate this exploit? It's not like it's a random bug that exists within legitimate code or Firefox itself.

EDIT: Just reading the Ars link. If a site, no matter how legitimate or well known, uses a compromised ad network then it is no longer a safe site. That is a big issue beyond this specific exploit. There are lots of nasty phishing attacks that become a hell of a lot more persuasive if they are seemingly served from a trusted site.

EDITEDIT: On the odd occasion that I've got stuck on one of these sites one of my strats has been to carefully position the error (or whatever box) so the cancel button lies over the close tab button, and then mash like hell
If all else fails CCleaner has "Session" in it's Firefox cleaning options. If you kill Firefox and then run that FF wont try to restore tabs.

 

Is this a copypasta form a times long past?
chances are if you are using Firefox, its already the alternative.

 

And this is why I tell all my less-tech-savvy family to adblock everything. Sadly things like NoScript break too much to make them feasible for them, or I'd suggest that too. Ad networks are great targets - if you can get a malicious ad into one, even for a few hours, it can hit a wide range of sites and catch a fair number of people.

Also, in no reality should a website need to feed me scripts from 15+ different ad/tracking networks.

It would be hilarious if it worked on Linux as well.

 

My tactic when it happened to me was kill it with task manager, then mash escape when restarting the browser to cancel loading of the active tab.

 

Just turn off your network connection before loading up firefox .

 

That's harder.

(I also don't actually use Firefox. I've hated it since it was Phoenix, and somehow it gets WORSE every time I take another look. Dunno what I'm doing once Seamonkey development collapses, but I'm sure that it isn't "switch to Firefox".)