After almost two years without a problem, a laptop with a direct internet connection running Linux lubuntu was hacked and I got message along the lines "Can't open firefox, another instance is already running, close this process or reboot"

Found a .mozilla file on the DESKTOP. Once removed the browser behaviour improved. Zeroed drive and upgraded to Linux Mint 14. [I was just trialling an old CD installation with updates, to see if I liked it or not].

What I would like to know is if anyone has had this happen or not. My suspicion is with a truly sick bastard former business associate, running a persistent BF and DOS attack. However my ISP had been having DNS server problems discussed on forums for ages, and recently requests were being sent to akamai servers instead.

But has anyone else found this file on their desktop? Also when I clicked to bring up lower panel menu I saw something weird going on with scripts being written. Then + - and box buttons disappeared from the firefox browser and other windows of apps I opened. I bailed at this stage and lost very little if any data.

That is not the way to do forensics.
Use stat on important directories and check from a live cd/usb

Yeah, it's been a while since we saw you around...


When Firefox is running you will find two items in your Firefox profile directory: a symbolic link called "lock" and an empty file called ".parentlock". When Firefox wasn't closed properly it did not clean up the two items and that is why you get the message. When Firefox is not running delete both items. When restarting Firefox the message should not appear again.


After zeroing out a drive all "evidence" is gone, meaning there's nothing left for us to check and verify. Also it's not been the first time this occurred and I had hoped you would have learned from past experiences. So next time please contact us as things happen and without doing the things you usually do. It really does not help us help you.

I've seen this error message occasionally where I close Firefox and then I try to restart it, perhaps too quickly, but it still has a process running. I typically end up doing a ps | grep firefox and then killing the process, which allows for a restart. In my case, I am certain that the problem is not a machine 'hack'.

The days I used firefox I had the same thing many times, for some reason Firefox didn't shut down correctly, so that I had to kill it.

So you suddenly have problems with Firefox and your window manager, although it worked fine for 2 years. in that case I would rather assume a hardware problem than anything else, especially if you have already made a clean re-install.