Mozilla has expanded its Safe Browsing service for Firefox to monitor malicious downloads as well as malicious websites.
According to a Mozilla blog, the latest version of Firefox (as of July 22nd ) will protect users by comparing files users download against these lists of malicious files, and blocking them from infecting your system. A future version of Firefox (released in September) will further verify the signature when a user downloads an application file. If it is signed, Firefox then compares the signature with a list of known safe publishers.
For files that are not identified by the lists as “safe” (allowed) or as “malware” (blocked), Firefox asks Google’s Safe Browsing service if the software is safe by sending it some of the download’s metadata.
