Lightbeam by Firefox

[XPostFacto]

This new revolutionary addon by Firefox, which tells you, who is spying on you while you're at a website sounds awesome. It came out last Thursday. Well, yesterday, I went to what was identified as a Mozilla Firefox site and downloaded Lightbeam. As my antivirus and firewall, I use Zonealarm. Right away, my firewall went off telling me that a program was trying to take control of my system. I hesitated before telling Zonealarm to allow the intrusion, and it was a good thing I did because right afterwards the antivirus popped up to inform me that it had quarantined a malicious file. This was the file it quarantined:

not-a-virus:AdWare.Win32.DownloadWare.jt.

This is a trogan program, which allows unwanted ads to pop up and may allow criminals to use your computer for nefarious reasons. I understand it is hard to remove. Luckily Zonealarm found it. It's a good thing because when I once used McAfee, it never found any problems, yet when I bought a laptop for my wife last year, the try and buy Symantec program found a worm.

I'm not here to advertise different antivirus programs, though. What concerns me is that I either got on a phoney site spoofing as Mozilla, or this Lightbeam is not all that Mozilla says it is. Could Mozilla be releasing this new add on, all with the idea of spying on its users? In any event, be careful what you download, even if it appears to be coming from a legitimate site. Maybe Lightbeam needs to be checked out more thoroughly.

 

[Ringel05]

Mozilla generally doesn't write the add ons, others do and submit them to Mozilla for use.
Lightbeam is a legitimate extension which tells me your ZoneAlarm gave you a false positive which is most likely or your ZoneAlarm has been compromised. I stopped using ZoneAlarm years ago and multiple false positives was one of the reasons.

 

[XPostFacto]

Mozilla generally doesn't write the add ons, others do and submit them to Mozilla for use.
Lightbeam is a legitimate extension which tells me your ZoneAlarm gave you a false positive which is most likely or your ZoneAlarm has been compromised. I stopped using ZoneAlarm years ago and multiple false positives was one of the reasons.

I did discover that had I gone into Firefox Tools and clicked on Addons, then "Get Addons", and finally "Browse Addons", I would have found Light Beam but further on down through the pages. My mistake is that I Googled for it and found what I thought was a legit site because it did say Mozilla. I will try it again and report what happens. If Zonealarm triggers, I suppose I will have to go back to McAfee, since I am licensed for the enterprise version and eternal updates.

 

[Ringel05]

Mozilla generally doesn't write the add ons, others do and submit them to Mozilla for use.
Lightbeam is a legitimate extension which tells me your ZoneAlarm gave you a false positive which is most likely or your ZoneAlarm has been compromised. I stopped using ZoneAlarm years ago and multiple false positives was one of the reasons.

I did discover that had I gone into Firefox Tools and clicked on Addons, then "Get Addons", and finally "Browse Addons", I would have found Light Beam but further on down through the pages. My mistake is that I Googled for it and found what I thought was a legit site because it did say Mozilla. I will try it again and report what happens. If Zonealarm triggers, I suppose I will have to go back to McAfee, since I am licensed for the enterprise version and eternal updates.

I never use separate sites for add ons unless I know it's the correct site. I also stopped using Norton and MaAfee eons ago because they are so invasive and huge resource hogs. I use Avast as my primary and Malwarebytes as my backup, the Windows firewall (in combination with Avast) is more than adequate protection and they don't hog resources or entwine themselves throughout my computer. When I use Linux I have ClamTK and the Linux firewall.
The only one that cost me was Windows firewall, obviously when I bought the Windows OS.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

This new revolutionary addon by Firefox, which tells you, who is spying on you while you're at a website sounds awesome. It came out last Thursday. Well, yesterday, I went to what was identified as a Mozilla Firefox site and downloaded Lightbeam. As my antivirus and firewall, I use Zonealarm. Right away, my firewall went off telling me that a program was trying to take control of my system. I hesitated before telling Zonealarm to allow the intrusion, and it was a good thing I did because right afterwards the antivirus popped up to inform me that it had quarantined a malicious file. This was the file it quarantined:

not-a-virus:AdWare.Win32.DownloadWare.jt.

This is a trogan program, which allows unwanted ads to pop up and may allow criminals to use your computer for nefarious reasons. I understand it is hard to remove. Luckily Zonealarm found it. It's a good thing because when I once used McAfee, it never found any problems, yet when I bought a laptop for my wife last year, the try and buy Symantec program found a worm.

I'm not here to advertise different antivirus programs, though. What concerns me is that I either got on a phoney site spoofing as Mozilla, or this Lightbeam is not all that Mozilla says it is. Could Mozilla be releasing this new add on, all with the idea of spying on its users? In any event, be careful what you download, even if it appears to be coming from a legitimate site. Maybe Lightbeam needs to be checked out more thoroughly.

Collusion, now called Lightbeam, has been around for over a year. I don't use it because I block trackers using other methods, which defeats what Lightbeam is about, but it doesn't have any viruses.

 

[longknife]

I used Google to get to the Mozilla site to download Lightbeam.

As for McAfee, it comes with my Cox cable subscription and I'm not that thrilled with it. It seems my Windows firewall and Defender do more than an adequate job.

When checking for Malware, I use Malwarebyte and that also does the job.

 

[XPostFacto]

Okay, I installed the right copy of Lightbeam, but there are no instructions, nor do I see any difference. Down on the lower left hand corner of Firefox, I see different websites loading, but I saw that activity before Lightbeam was installed. I don't see what it does so I think I will just remove it. I always considered that addons were additional bloat designed to slow down my access to the Internet. Can any of you IT geniuses tell me how to properly make use of Lightbeam?

 

[strollingbones]

help my firefox is fucked......I cant use it.....something has invaded and I get pop ups to the point its unusable....help

 

[iamwhatiseem]

Okay, I installed the right copy of Lightbeam, but there are no instructions, nor do I see any difference. Down on the lower left hand corner of Firefox, I see different websites loading, but I saw that activity before Lightbeam was installed. I don't see what it does so I think I will just remove it. I always considered that addons were additional bloat designed to slow down my access to the Internet. Can any of you IT geniuses tell me how to properly make use of Lightbeam?

yep...don't use it.
Use this instead...not only does it show you other sites tracking you - but allows you to block them. It is a bit of a pain in the ass at the beginning as you "teach" it what things you want to allow.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/

 

[XPostFacto]

Mozilla generally doesn't write the add ons, others do and submit them to Mozilla for use.
Lightbeam is a legitimate extension which tells me your ZoneAlarm gave you a false positive which is most likely or your ZoneAlarm has been compromised. I stopped using ZoneAlarm years ago and multiple false positives was one of the reasons.

I did discover that had I gone into Firefox Tools and clicked on Addons, then "Get Addons", and finally "Browse Addons", I would have found Light Beam but further on down through the pages. My mistake is that I Googled for it and found what I thought was a legit site because it did say Mozilla. I will try it again and report what happens. If Zonealarm triggers, I suppose I will have to go back to McAfee, since I am licensed for the enterprise version and eternal updates.

I never use separate sites for add ons unless I know it's the correct site. I also stopped using Norton and MaAfee eons ago because they are so invasive and huge resource hogs. I use Avast as my primary and Malwarebytes as my backup, the Windows firewall (in combination with Avast) is more than adequate protection and they don't hog resources or entwine themselves throughout my computer. When I use Linux I have ClamTK and the Linux firewall.
The only one that cost me was Windows firewall, obviously when I bought the Windows OS.

When I ran McAfee, I never would let it start up when I booted up because it took too long scanning files. I turned it completely off until I needed it to do a scan. That way, it didn't hog anything. I got rid of it because it never found anything, yet my system was infected at the time. I used McAfee instead of Norton because whether you turned Norton off at startup or not, it ran the hard drive all the time.

 

[XPostFacto]

Okay, I just noticed that Lightbeam is mentioned down at the bottom of the Tools tab. I will experiment with it for awhile and see what happens, but so far, I am less than impressed.

 

[XPostFacto]

help my firefox is fucked......I cant use it.....something has invaded and I get pop ups to the point its unusable....help

That's one of the symptoms of that trogan I mentioned in the OP.

 

[strollingbones]

I have ran programs to stop it and all but it continues

 

[Ringel05]

help my firefox is fucked......I cant use it.....something has invaded and I get pop ups to the point its unusable....help

Hey Bones. What exactly are the pop ups, are they the same thing over and over or different one's popping up and when did this start?
Also are you using Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7?

 

[longknife]

help my firefox is fucked......I cant use it.....something has invaded and I get pop ups to the point its unusable....help

Hey Bones. What exactly are the pop ups, are they the same thing over and over or different one's popping up and when did this start?
Also are you using Windows XP, Vista or Windows 7?

Go to Tools, then Options, then Content - check the box to block popups and see if that helps.