[Tfug] My Opera browser has malware

Ranjan Grover ranjan.grover at gmail.com
Fri Jan 5 21:34:09 MST 2007


> Seems I've been infected with some type of malware which redirects to
> mediaplex.  I'm using Opera and Kubuntu.  In searching for a removal
> solution I see numerous avenues available to Win users, none so far for
> Linux.  One of the reasons for moving to Linux was to avoid crap like this.
>
> What do I do?  Thanks.

Could you perhaps give more details on how you got infected / or why
you think you are infected? Have you tried just deleting all your
cookies? I have cookies from mediaplex.com as well and as far as I can
tell, they don't do anything to affect my experience.

I'm using Opera 9.1 build 521 and Debian/Sid and am long term Opera
user.  Even if something was infected, you can probably (as was
earlier suggested) rename the .opera folder to a different one and
restart the browser to create a new .opera folder. Honestly, I will be
quite surprised if the binary executable itself got infected. If it
did, then it's probably more of a Linux security issue than opera.
This is of course under the assumption that you are not running every
application with system-wide or super-user privileges.

If you do see that that after the new .opera folder, the mediaplex
stuff is gone, try transferring files from your .opera_old to the new
.opera folder and see where the problem lies.
-- 
Ranjan Grover, Ph.D.
College of Optical Sciences
University of Arizona




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