Mozilla is building an army of volunteers in Indonesia to help customize Firefox and recommend add-ons, as the U.S.-based non-profit organization seeks to retain its massive share of the browser market in the country.

Community groups in eight cities and drawing about 1,000 tech-savvy volunteers, with more expected, are meeting this month to brainstorm ways Firefox can be further localized, said Gen Kanai, Mozilla’s contributor engagement director for Asia. They will do some of the work themselves in line with Mozilla’s tradition of using inputs from its users, Kanai said.

Mozilla wants that input so it can retain the high market share that Firefox already has in the country. Web statistics company, StatCounter, puts the share at 75 to 80 percent, the browser's highest in Asia. The worldwide share of Firefox, which competes with Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, is just over 30 percent.

Outreach matters because technology spreads fast by word of mouth in Indonesia, a possible cause of Firefox's market share, Kanai said. Technology favorites can also lose ground very fast in the country, as was seen in the mobile phone market, he added.  

Mozilla does not fully understand why Firefox has caught on in Indonesia, Kanai said. But analysts and users say local Web developers benefit from Firefox's do-it-yourself plug-ins and extensions, which other browsers may not offer except for fees that not everyone in the developing nation of 238 million can afford.

"It's because people can design it however they want, however they need to," said Yofie Setiawan, a web designer and member of a community group in the capital Jakarta. "Then they will tell their friends, who (will) use it also."  

Word of mouth as well as hands-on design options may explain why so many Indonesians use Firefox, said Ray Valdes, an analyst with market research firm Gartner.

"Often the reason (for popularity) is not technical but social," Valdes said. "The other possibility is that the ecosystem is propagating it."

Although nothing will be decided until the community group meetings, the 13-year-old Mozilla may try to solidify its position in Indonesia by encouraging new browser add-ons, such as toolbars, expressly for Indonesian websites and web services.

It is also considering new localized versions of Firefox in languages such as Sundanese, which is used by some 30 million people in the western part of the Indonesia island of Java.  

"More Indonesian Mozilla developers could lead to new localizations," Kanai said. "These would be developed by Mozilla community members in Indonesia."

Source: IDG News Service

Malware makers and scammers have quickly latched onto the news that U.S. military forces killed Osama Bin Laden, security researchers said today.

Antivirus vendors have spotted multiple threats based on the news, including links that lead to fake security software -- dubbed "rogueware" -- attack code masquerading as plug-ins that users must supposedly download to view video, and attempts to harvest personal information.

Sunday night, President Obama announced that a special operations team had assaulted the Pakistani compound of Bin Laden, and during a firefight, shot and killed the al-Qaeda leader .

Cyber criminals wasted no time in leveraging the news. "Hackers love a big, breaking story, said Rob Rachwald of Imperva, a Redwood Shores, Calif. security firm, in a post to the company's blog Monday.

Rachwald reported that Imperva had monitored forums where hackers bragged about posting fake videos, then duping users into clicking a Facebook "Like" button that in fact generate "Likes" to a product or service page they're promoting.

"This is one of those rare opportunities that can build you a great list and a couple of zeros in your profit," an anonymous hacker crowed. "Use it while the news of Bin Laden killed by US forces is hot. I just started one and it had 600 likes in 2 minutes."

"Not at all unexpected," said Sam Masiello, chief security officer at Return Path, of the quick appearance of Bin Laden-related threats. "We saw it with the death of Michael Jackson, with the death of Elizabeth Taylor, with [Hurricane] Katrina, with the Japanese earthquake. But Bin Laden will be effective [for scammers] because he's such a polarizing figure."

With the tight window of opportunity, Masiello said that hackers and scammers simply recycle existing campaigns and malicious content whenever a major news story breaks.

Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab said it had seen criminals poisoning Google Images search results with black-ops SEO (search engine optimization) tactics. The sites, which are artificially promoted to high spots in Google's search rankings, redirect victims to malicious URLs that in turn try to convince users to download rogueware.

Rogueware is the term for bogus security software that claims the user's machine is heavily infected and constantly nags the victim with pervasive pop-ups and alerts until they fork over a fee to purchase the worthless program.

"We've been tracking this group for months," said Kurt Baumgartner, a senior malware researcher at Kaspersky. "They're using the same black hat SEO tactics to promote their sites, and using the same fake AV distribution domains."

Other Kaspersky researchers are tracking Facebook scams that rely on the Bin Laden news to extract personal information from consumers, such as their email addresses. The bait: Free tickets on Southwest Airlines or free Subway sandwiches. 

While search- and Facebook-related Bin Laden scams were the first to kick off after Sunday's news, Masiello expects that other tactics, including malware-infected spam, to follow shortly.

Users can protect themselves by "being diligent," said Masiello, and not clicking on links to Bin Laden-related news. Instead, he advised users to type in URLs manually for trusted news sites. Baumgartner recommended that users equip themselves with a comprehensive security package that will block attempted installs of rogueware, or failing that, to disable JavaScript, or rely on the Firefox NoScript add-on.

 Source: Computerworld