my firefox got hacked, messagebox / alert spam / lots of messageboxes
 

This is a rather strange occurrence, but yesterday while browsing the net (I admit the sites were not exactly friendly, so they may have been the culprits) using firefox I suddenly got spammed by messageboxes or firefox alert boxes or whatever they are, just hundreds of them all started opening and I couldn't close them. They opened about several hundred windows of the same message (it looked blank). I had to kill Xorg to stop it.

Anyone else had such an issue ?

I have Noscript and adblock installed, I disabled javascript from modifying anything about windows, and I don't think that I had enabled javascript on any site when this happened, but I may be wrong. This may have been triggered by javascript, or ever worse by some FF exploit that I don't know about.

Is there any way to limit the number of such alert messages or just disable them completely, I f'n hate them ! They remind me of Windoze :(

Anyway, I'll keep looking for a solution and will post it if I find it, but I'm just wondering if someone already knows it.

Be default, noscript should lock any javascript that you don't explicitly enable, unless you have softened the configuration a bit or something, which you shouldn't. And javascript, as far as I know, is the only mechanism that firefox has to do this, since there's no ActiveX in Linux.

So, I'd start by either checking the noscript configuration or by completely cleaning all the firefox files in your home.

The settings for noscript are as close to the default as can be, I have everything blocked by default.

Try changing dom.popup_maximum to a reasonably low number, such as 2. The default value in Firefox is 20, but there aren't many legitimate reasons for a web page to launch more than two popups at a time, and definitely not 20!

Also check privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins it should be set to 2 by default.

And double check Edit>Preferences>Content> Block Popups is checked.

Ok, thanks, I changed it from 20 to 2, maybe this was the problem. What kinds of popups are these limiting ?

Either way popups are being blocked.